Why do we even bother with metaphysical and philosophical questions?

One day, when my daughter was seven years old, we were looking at some old pictures and there was a picture with “Santa” visiting some gathering of children. I said “Oh, there’s Santa”. She said “No, that’s just Bob (a family friend) dressed up as Santa”. I said “How do you know?”.

She went on to use some logical arguments, based on how the “real Santa” acts, to show that the person in the picture could not have been the real Santa.

What interested me was the fact that, even though she got the conclusion right (i.e. that person was not Santa, it was the family friend my daughter suspected), and even though her arguments were logical, her arguments were based on an erroneous assumption, namely, that Santa Claus exists and that he behaves in a certain way.

She could not even fathom (at that age), that the central assumption in her arguments was false. Which made me see how futile her efforts at logical reasoning based on this false assumption were.

This in turn made me think how futile our efforts most probably are when we try to reason about the nature of existence/reality. This is because many of our assumptions (about what it means to exist, what it means for something to be “outside” our universe, etc) are most probably wrong.

It seems futile to logically debate about the ultimate nature of reality, when, no matter how logically correct our arguments might be, they are likely based on some erroneous assumptions, and we can never know which assumptions are correct or not.

To put it simply, to make a logical argument, you need some assumptions and then you need to follow the rules of logic to come to some conclusion. Sometimes logic can be used to show that the assumptions are false (e.g if they are logically inconsistent), but most “well constructed” assumptions are not logically inconsistent, and therefore cannot be shown to be false using logic.

In that case, you are arguing correctly, but your conclusions are meaningless.

The experience with my daughter made me think that maybe all of our (as humanity) metaphysical discussions and resulting logical reasonings are meaningless.

Originally published at https://andrewoneverything.com. Original responses:

• Kyle: This is an awesome and succinct story and resonates with me. There's a point at which logic no longer helps, if you ask why rigorously enough