I posted this on the old PF but unfortunately it did not receive as much attention as I had hoped. So anyway here goes:

"If I turn the handle, then the door will open."

"The door has opened. Therefore, something must have turned the handle."

"If I push the vase, then the vase will break."

"The vase is broken. Therefore, something must have pushed the vase."

We use counterfactuals all the time to evaluate our environment and predict the behavior of entities around us. To be able to predict the behavior of things at a high rate of accuracy would have been extremely evolutionarily advantageous. Some philosophers have thought that it is our ability for counterfactual thinking that allows us to participate in metaphysical modality discussions, but that is a different topic (although quite interesting, I'm thinking of making a post on this in the future).

The topic I wish to discuss here is the source of Absurdity, which I believe to arise from our liberal use of counterfactuals. Camus thought the Absurd was like an actor without a stage. In my more analytic view, I believe the Absurd is the anxiety that we feel when we cannot find a reasonable antecedent for the subsequent.

Unlike the previous examples involving the door and the vase, in which we know the antecedent and the subsequent, the counterfactual incident involving a human being and his condition is only half-known, by the subsequent.

Therefore, we can only create a counterfactual in the reverse:

"A human being exists. Therefore...___"

The subsequent, a human being exists, is a given. But we are removed from access to the antecedent. We are unable to complete our narrative immediately.

This raises anxiety in us, as in the everyday we know both the antecedent and the subsequent of many, if not most, counterfactual incidents we create in our mind. For the same reason a broken twig without an explanation would raise anxiety (for it may be a predator), the very existence of the human being without an explanation raises anxiety as a defense mechanism.

We can ask if we will ever know the antecedent of our personal subsequent, if there is one. To assume there is an antecedent would be to assume the PSR, which is another question in itself but one that I feel is quite pertinent to this discussion.

Are there good reasons to go beyond Camusian Absurdity, or perhaps my counterfactual version of Absurdity, and claim that there is no antecedent? I think that part of the absurdity of the human condition is the pure agnosticism one seems to have to take to it.