Conditional Nihilism

We’ve got conditional desires. There are some things we care about, only on the condition that some state of affairs obtain. I care about having a career in philosophy, conditional on its’ being a rewarding and self-fulfilling career. I care about the cause of vegetarianism on the condition that animals are conscious (or something like conscious) and that they are capable of suffering (or something like suffering).

Nihilists are people who care about nothing. Conditional nihilists are people who care about nothing, conditional on some fact obtaining. Sometimes people claim to be conditional nihilists of one form or another: conditional on God not existing, or there being no objective facts about value, nothing matters.

Conditional nihilism is one possible response to the modern atheistic scientific worldview: conditional on it all just being a bunch of atoms in the void, maybe nothing really matters -- not in the sense that nothing objectively matters (I think that is certainly the case), but in the sense that nothing matters to me.

Few people I know seem not to be conditional nihilists of that sort. Yes the universe is large, and yes our stay here is temporary, but that doesn’t matter for what we care about. We’re comfortable with our own cosmic insignificance – we’ve come to think that we can recognize our own insignificance from a certain perspective without devaluing the things we care about.

However, this is just one sort of conditional nihilism. There may be other possible facts, perhaps facts that we’ve never considered, that would throw our self-conceptions into doubt and cause us to forsake the things we think of as valuable.

I suspect that the received view about the ultimate nature of reality – that it consists of a bunch of particles or particle-like things spread out in a contingent fashion in a single space-time region -- is wrong. I suspect that the world is very different from how we ordinarily think of it. I don’t have any alternative view that I think is more plausible, but instead I think that our evidence about the fundamental nature of reality is very tenuous, and that we shouldn’t think that recent advancements in science give us much of a clue about reality is ultimately like. The world is fairly likely to be a lot stranger than we suspect.

So I wonder about the possibility of nihilism conditional on the true nature of reality, whatever it is. At the very least, I think that it is not altogether unlikely that the things we would care about, if we knew the true nature of reality, are very different from the things that we actually care about.
 

Part of the reason that I am worried is that there are ways that are taken seriously about how the world might actually be that would radically undermine our every-day concerns.

According to some versions of the Everettian interpretation of quantum mechanics, quantum chanciness involves what might be termed universe-branching. The universe isn’t a single linear progression of medium-sized objects evolving and interacting the way we ordinarily think. Rather, it is a tree of distinct progressions of medium-sized objects evolving and interacting in all possible ways consistent with the initial state of the universe.

If this is true, then our lives are very different from how we conceive of them. We might instead think of ourselves as a branch on a splitting tree of personality, and this would have a radical impact on what we think about our future.

Would I still care about getting a job, or living a long and happy life? What would that even mean? Whatever happens to one branch will not happen to another, and for all I can tell, those branches are just as much a part of me.

I am tempted by nihilism, or something like it, conditional on this interpretation. At the very least, I think I would need to rethink what I care about, if I found out that this was the reality.

I don’t have any opinion about the particular viability of branching interpretations. I suspect that they are mistaken. But I can’t help but be very strongly bothered by the existence of these interpretations. It helps to demonstrate how a misconception of reality might fundamentally affect the way that we think about ourselves and what we care about.

The universe might be strange in the way that Everettians have suggested. It might also be strange in a lot of other ways that I have not or cannot imagine.

How likely is it that we would be nihilists conditional on the true nature of reality, whatever it is? I have no idea. To make a reasonable guess, I think I would need to have at least a small catalogue of possible ways reality could be, and see how many of them would erode my present cares. My imagination, however, is most certainly a bad guide to epistemically possible realities.

Metaphysicians have been rather bad at coming up with radically weird interpretations of reality. We don’t have a sufficient catalogue of possibilities to know how many of them undermine our present conception of ourselves or our cares as our general understanding of possibility is generally based off of our conception of the world we live in. For this reason, I think we can’t really know. I am tempted to think that the question of what the likelihood is that I am a nihilist conditional on the true nature of reality, is as inscrutable as the question of what the true nature of reality really is.