Reductio ad absurdum is a technique I use often when thinking and arguing about things. It’s when you push a point to its absolute logical extreme and see what the implications there are. Sometimes it can become ridiculous through this process, which in turn may (but not necessarily) reveal some new insights about the original idea. Extrapolation is a limited form of this technique, but one can easily go overboard with it. When our existing knowledge is too limited, or when our assumptions are too simplistic, or when we are reaching too far in scope or time, we can end up overextrapolating. And this can have large consequences.

There is the kind of overextrapolation that acts as a super optimistic cheerleader, and helps drive progress. Thinking that chess (and later go) more or less encapsulated human intelligence is a form of this type of overextrapolation. Yes, in hindsight, that was pretty stupid, but it helped encourage and push for development in the area of chess playing computer programs, and we’ve learned a lot about the nature of intelligence in the process. We are in a similar situation now with self-driving cars, as many people keep making the claim that “it’ll be here within 5 years”, for the past 10 years or so. But this type of overextrapolation usually does more good than harm. Even though the extrapolated conclusions are wrong, they still motivate us to tackle very difficult problems in the present.

But then there is the kind of overextrapolation that does more harm than good. Nihilism is perhaps the quintessential example of an overextrapolation of this form. It tries to push our current understanding of the world and the powers of rationality too widely in scope and too far into the future. And the result is absurd and often counterproductive. Where does the negative consequences of this type of overextrapolation come from?

Thomas Nagel supposedly described the following scene. A man enthusiastically calls the woman of his dreams. Upon the call connecting, he immediately proclaims passionately, “I love you Susan, I want to be with you forever and always. I can’t wait to see you…” Only to be interrupted in a few seconds by a mechanical voice, “Susan can’t come to the phone right now, please leave a message after the beep.” The point that Nagel was trying to illustrate was that absurdity comes from the clash of different perspectives. There was nothing nonsensical about the situation until the man (and we) realized who (or what) was on the other side of the line. The perspective of the emotional man in love is incomprehensibly different from the perspective of the cold answering machine, and this clash instantly eliminated the meaning of his proclamation and rendered the situation absurd.

I think this is where the negative consequences of overextrapolations like nihilism come from. It isn’t from taking certain perspectives to the extreme, but rather from the conflict of those extreme perspectives with our other perspectives. Absurdism acknowledges this, but I’m not entirely happy with its answer to this problem. Nihilism uses current knowledge and rationality to get to some “ultimate perspective”, that there is no inherent meaning in the world. But because this conclusion is extrapolated from our knowledge of the now, it then implicitly tries to impose that ultimate perspective on everything, including our other perspectives at various levels of our lives, perspectives of the now. This clash spawns absurdity.

One of the practical teachings of absurdism is to simply embrace this absurdity so we can move on with life. But I see no reason to hold so tightly onto the extrapolated ultimate perspective. In Nagel’s example, upon realizing the difference in perspectives, the man presumably did not continue to profess his love to the machine, and instead hung up immediately. To confront the absurd in the face of overextrapolated perspectives is like a bride upon seeing the projections of her husband count (based on data from her wedding day), concluding that “this is absurd, but I guess I should just embrace this absurdity and move on.”

When we realize that the ultimate perspective of nihilism comes from a form of overextrapolation, we should perhaps stop privileging it over other perspectives (which is not the same as rejecting the ultimate perspective outright). There are many different layers of perspectives below (and maybe even above) the ultimate perspective, and they all have their own utilities depending on the context. By recognizing this, we can avoid the clash of perspectives caused by trying to shoehorn any particular perspective into situations that it isn’t suited for, thereby eliminating the absurdity that comes from that clash. This kind of meta-perspective, in my opinion, is a more satisfying answer to nihilism than the ones that absurdism typically proposes.