How do we know life is not a dream?

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1:00This is But Why, a podcast for curious kids from Vermont Public. I'm Jane Lindholm. On this show we take questions from curious kids just like you and we find answers. Every now and then, actually more frequently than you might think, we get questions that are really, really big and very hard to answer. These are the questions from kids who are wrestling with what we call existential questions. Things like why do humans exist? Why is life sometimes unfair? Things about punishment and kindness, how we define art, or what if we're all living in a dream and we just don't know it. Another way to describe these kinds of questions is to say they're philosophical in nature.

2:02What's philosophy? My favorite definition of philosophy actually comes from my son from when he was in second grade. That's Scott Hirschowitz. He teaches philosophy and law at the University of Michigan. He said philosophy is the art of thinking, which I think is a really perfect description. So what we do when we do philosophy is we think about the world and we think about ourselves and we try to understand them better. Because Scott's a philosophy professor, he spends a lot of his time thinking about these kinds of complicated questions that don't always have a straightforward answer. Like why do we need to follow the law? Or why do parents or other adults get to tell you what you should or shouldn't do? What are the reasons to let some other people decide what you are going to do sometimes and when are those times and when is it okay for you to do what you want to do? So that's a philosophy question because the way to learn about it is not to go into a laboratory and it's not to go search for things in the woods or it's not to do science.

3:07It's just to think really carefully about the problem and see what we can learn about it. We talk about some of the what we call existential questions that kids have sent us. And so the idea of an existential question is it's a question about our existence. It's a question about who we are and what the world is and why it works the way it does and how do we know that? And one of those fundamental questions is one we've gotten from a lot of kids who wondered basically just what's the meaning of life? What's the purpose of life? My name is Ben, I'm from Philadelphia, my question is what's the meaning of life? My name is Nick, I live in Louisville, Kentucky, I'm seven years old, why are people's purpose made? Hi, my name is Layton, I am eight years old, I live in Austin, Texas, my question is why do humans exist? My name is Olivia, I am six years old, I live in the mom this well, I wouldn't know what

4:07is life for. My name is Violet, I am five years old, I live in Eglot, California, why do people even exist? Hi, this is Avery, I am seven year, seven and a half, I live in Seattle, why are we here this moment and how did we exist? Yeah, I think this is such an important question and it's a question that everybody thinks about and I think there's different ways in which we might going about trying to answer it. So, some people who are religious, some people who believe in God think that maybe the world was designed and we were put here for a reason and that maybe that we can try and find out what God's purpose is for us. And then there's non-religious ways of thinking about this problem. Just think about the size of the universe, I think how big it is, right? There's billions and billions of light years across and there's billions of billions

5:13of stars and probably billions and billions of planets and we're just on a tiny planet, right? That's the third rock from a sun, from a star, that's not even all that specialist star, I think, wow, the whole universe couldn't really be about us, right? So, I'm not sure that there's a purpose to our lives, I'm not sure that there's meaning to our lives, but I think we can give our own lives a purpose and we can make meaning in our lives. So, that's a distinction floss where sometimes draw a difference between finding meaning, what is the meaning of our lives and finding meaning in our lives. And so, I think one of the coolest things about getting the chance to be a person is deciding what meaning you'll have in your life and that may be meaning that you find an important relationship, your relationships with your family and your friends. It might be meaning that you find and work that you do, right?

6:14Maybe you'll be a doctor or a firefighter and you'll get to do really meaningful things, helping people or saving people or maybe it'll be meaning that you create through art. There's so many different things you can do that will be meaningful to you and meaningful to other people. And so, I think instead of trying to find out what we're for, we should think of the world as the canvas that's been put in front of us and we can decide what we're going to paint on it. Um, Janelle and Vancouver puts a slight twist on the question. What is the point of life if you're going to die anyway? Oh, wow, that is a really tough question. So here's a way to think about it. So the thought behind Janelle's question is, if something's going to end, then maybe it doesn't have a point, maybe it's not worth engaging in. And so I'm thinking right now about other things that have ends and wondering whether that's true, right? So a book has an end, right?

7:14But I love books. I love, I love them even though I know the story is going to come to an end or music comes to an end, but I still think music can be really lovely. And maybe a human life is like that, right? Though it's the kind of thing that has an end, right? There can be lots of beauty and significance and important things that happen inside that life. And I'll go one step further. There are lots of philosophers who have thought that it's the end of our lives that gives meaning to what happens in them, right? So just imagine what it would be like to be a mortal to live absolutely forever, right? And if you were a mortal, right, you really wouldn't have to make any choices, right? You wouldn't have to make a choice about say, are you going to be a doctor or a firefighter, right? Or are you going to be an artist or an auto mechanic? Because if you were a mortal, you could be a doctor and then a firefighter and then an

8:14artist and then an auto mechanic. And you wouldn't have to decide what instruments you were going to learn to play. There'd be time to learn to play all of them. And many philosophers have thought it's the scarcity, it's the having to make a decision, it's the not being able to do everything that makes our choices important. So maybe it's the end of our lives that gives the things we do within them a point. Well, here's another question that I think a lot of us have wondered too, and often when hard things come into our lives. My name is Vivian, I am six years old. I'm from Gunside, Pennsylvania. My question is, why is life sad? Yeah, why is life sad? Well, I think there's different kinds of reasons that we get sad. So sometimes we're sad because say we've lost someone that we love or maybe we've lost something that we love or maybe there was an activity that we were excited about and now it's

9:17behind us and we're feeling a little bit sad. And I think one thing to remember when we're sad for those kinds of reasons is that it's in some ways the other side of love. So to love someone is to feel really attached to them and it's what comes along with feeling really attached to them is being sad when we lose them and that can be true for things in our lives, special objects that we care about or special times in our lives. Maybe you love going to camp or maybe you love going to the swimming pool and that makes it a little bit sad to leave, but that sadness is a marker of something really special of the love that you have for it and they kind of go together. When I was thinking about this question, I think there's another kind of reason we get sad, which is when people don't treat us very nicely. And you know, we really hope that people are going to be kind and they're going to have philosophers like to use the word goodwill.

10:18They're going to show us goodwill and treat us respectfully and we get sad when they don't because it doesn't seem like they're taking us seriously, we're caring about us. And that kind of sadness, I think we could live without. I think we could all do a better job of treating each other nicely and showing respect and being kind and then we'd have less to be sad about. But the first kind of sadness, the sadness that just comes along with love, I think it's actually a good thing that we have it in our life because we really wouldn't have love without it. My name is Stella, I am eight years old, I live in Singapore. Why are people always too distracted by being in life to ever think about the theory of it? Well, I love this question because I think that it's most grown-ups who are too distracted by being in life but kids are not. And I think one is they have a lot of responsibilities, it's the grown-up maybe that has to cook dinner

11:19or do the laundry or go work at a job to have money to pay for all the things that we need in life. And that stuff can take up a lot of time and it can be very stressful. And I think when we feel busy and stressful, it's hard to take time to think about these deeper questions, these harder questions to answer, especially if we're not sure that we're going to find answers. But part of the reason that I like to teach philosophy and part of the reason that I like to talk about philosophy with kids and with other adults is I think that even grown-ups do have the same kind of curiosity about the world that kids do and that it's good to slow down sometimes and think about that, think about the harder questions. In part because it can remind you what's beautiful about the world or what's puzzling in it or to notice the things that are special about it and partly because it may lead you to wonder whether you should be spending so much time on things like your job or the dishes

12:22or laundry, maybe those actually aren't the best ways to spend all of our time even though they can be important things in philosophy invites you to think about that. So let's dive deeper into some of these questions that arise when we're thinking about existence and the world. Here's one from Gemma who's seven and lives in Vermont. Where was I before I was born? We have a whole episode that's all about how babies are made scientifically speaking. We'll link to that episode in our show notes. We know a lot about how the physical pieces of us come together from the DNA of our biological parents but how our minds or our essences form remains a big mystery. Yeah, it's a real puzzle and it's connected to some of the hardest problems that I think philosophers but also a lot of scientists are trying to figure out. So we're made out of physical things but that human being has a mind and we don't really understand what the relationship

13:26is between the stuff that we're made out of and the minds that we have, right? So some people think that our minds just are our brains, right? And other people think that our minds must be different things than our brains but then it's not clear what they are or how they relate to each other and I don't know the answers to this. I hope some kids listening will help us figure it out someday. My name is Teddy and eight years old and I live in London, England and Malice Bay, Vermont and this is my question. How do we know life is not a dream? So I have met so many people that wonder about this. Young and old in philosophy, there was a guy named a cart who was also a mathematician who was sitting by the fire one day and he was wondering whether he might be dreaming everything and even thousands of years before

14:27that there's an ancient Taoist text called the Zhuangji where a man named Zhuang Zhu said one day he dreamed he was a butterfly floating and floating around and then he woke up and he was solid unmistakable Zhuang Zhu but he wondered whether he was Zhuang Zhu who dreamed he was a butterfly or whether he was a butterfly who dreamed he was Zhuang Zhu. And so human beings have just been wondering about this question forever and one thought you might have is we can't know for sure, right? So philosophers call this skepticism, right? The idea that maybe we don't know what we think we know and maybe that applies to absolutely everything including like are we awake or are we dreaming and I think it's okay to be unsure, right? And to recognize that there's kind of limits to what we might know and to realize that we might be confused, right? But we might think well

15:32I'm happy with the way things are or at the end of the day it doesn't matter it's good to remind myself that I can question absolutely anything but that doesn't mean I should question everything all the time. My name is Mugor, I'm 11 years old and I live in Nairobi. Why is it that sometimes many people in a group are punished for something that only one person did like in class? I love this question this is another philosophy question about law because the law often hands out punishments and I think there's two ways of answering this question. One might be to say what's the grown-up who punishes the class when one or two kids has done something bad? What are they thinking? Well sometimes they're thinking that I can use the other kids in the class to put pressure on the kids that were behaving badly to start acting well, right? So they think that the kids who are behaving badly may care more about what their friends think than about what the teacher thinks and so if the friends get upset with them because they got punished then maybe they'll

16:37behave better. So philosophers talk about collective punishment and this is a kind of collective punishment and I think that's one reason that people sometimes use collective punishments. A different kind of question we can ask about it is is it fair to do collective punishment and I don't think it is. I think that when a teacher says I'm going to make everyone in the class unhappy because a couple people did something bad and that I'm going to try and use that peer pressure to get better behavior from the kids who are behaving bad. She's kind of using the other kids the ones that were acting well as a tool, right? To accomplish something and not treating them as individuals, not treating them with respect. So I think collective punishments the kind of thing that can work but I don't think it's a very nice thing to do. I think we should be treated based on the way we've acted and not based on the way other people have. Hi, my name is Oscar. I'm eight

17:37years old. I'm from Iceland. How do we learn from our mistakes? So I have this conversation with my students a lot. Not necessarily with big and important mistakes like being mean to someone or hurting someone but even just when they make mistakes on a test. Sometimes they just want to look at the answer, the right answer and then they think they're done and I think no that's just the start of learning from your mistakes because what you need to do is then think back to when you took that test and ask yourself how could I have done things differently so I would get to the right answer. And so I often think that that's true even when we make a mistake like saying something mean to a friend, right? So what we need to do is kind of a little bit of mental time travel. We need to think back to what we were feeling in that moment and ask ourselves why we said what we said or did what we did and if there was a better way to handle those feelings and maybe try and

18:41make a plan for next time something like that happens. I think that's a way to learn from your mistakes is to kind of plan out what you'll do differently if the same kind of situation arises. After the break we'll ponder more questions with Scott Hershowitz like is graffiti art? And how can narwhals be real? Stay with us. This is But Why. I'm Jane Lindholm and today we're talking with philosophy professor Scott Hershowitz who's here to help us tackle some of the biggest hardest questions about our lives and our world. Here's one from West in Baltimore. I see art on the bridges S when I'm going to school and why and it's called graffiti. Why do people do it? And West's question to me is interesting on the face of it but also is interesting in the idea of what do we call art and what do we call vandalism or painting something on other people's property when they shouldn't? What's art and what's

19:45not art? Yeah I wish we could ask a follow-up question because why do people do it? Could mean lots of things right so it could involve a kind of criticism like you've painted on other people's property and it's not nice to do that without permission and whether it's not nice I think might depend a little bit on the context so in some places graffiti isn't welcome but in other cities around the world there's a real tradition of street art and painting and maybe the folks who own buildings in those places are more open-minded and welcoming of that kind of expression but there's a deeper question here which is why do we make art? Why do we want to paint on the side of that bridge or on that wall and this is something that human beings have been doing

20:47as far back as we know there are human beings some of the earliest evidence we have for the existence of human beings is art that they painted on the wall of caves and I think there's a few answers one is we make art to communicate with each other we want to express things about ourselves and the way we see the world and when I see graffiti sometimes I think they're it's really beautiful or has really interesting ideas that are captured in the pictures that people are making sometimes I just think it's fun right to make something beautiful one thing I think kids know that adults forget is that something's being fun is a complete reason to do it and we don't it doesn't need to have some purpose beyond itself and painting whether it's graffiti or on a canvas is one of those activities like dancing it can just be fun and we don't need to ask why do it and have an answer

21:48in mind beyond we like doing it well in that case I'm going to give you maybe the toughest question of the day my name is Bella I am eight years old I live in Burlington Vermont why do people like the meme six seven so much why does six seven exist why does a six seven kid exist why does six seven exist and why does the six seven kid exist oh wow I might be too old to answer this question maybe this is a question that belongs to kids but if I was going to try and answer the question I think it's just a wonderful example of how playful human beings can be to take almost anything and to make a joke out of it or to make a game out of it and I can't say at my age I'm 49 years old that I fully understand the six seven game I've just noticed if I find a way to say six seven in my classroom that my students are amused but I think of it as just a way

22:54to play with with numbers and with language and to have fun with each other I also think it's an example of how forever before and probably forever into the future kids will try to find a way to confuse adults into being frustrated about what they don't know because so many times adults seem to act like we know more than kids and here's this thing that kids are like you know all in the know about and all these adults are like what does it mean and so it for me reminds me too yes that playfulness but also that kids have some power in the world to figure things out for themselves that adults don't have to understand that's definitely true and my younger son Hank likes to make clear how little I understand about the way kids talk these days so we'll roll his eyes if I try and use the the words I hear on tiktok if you've never seen a narwhal it's a kind of a whale

24:06that lives in very very cold ocean waters and it has a long tusk sticking straight out of its head they're amazing looking animals and someday I really want to see a narwhal in person but how can those animals be real it's such a good question because it looks like somebody just sort of mashed up a whale and a unicorn and that it had to have been imagined into existence but actually it's real and so it's a reminder that the actual world is as cool as any world we can imagine I have children who liked narwhals and so I did a little bit of research on that tusk and it turns out it's really useful to them right so the tusk because it extends far out from their heads it's really sensitive to vibrations and so it helps them pick up sounds and it helps them pick up other things that are moving in the water and it can sense the temperature of the water around them so that tusk is giving the narwhal a lot of information for helping it navigate and so that's

25:11the answer of how it evolved because of course the animals that exist are produced by evolution and the traits they have tend to be the traits that that make them successful right at being a narwhal or make them successful at being a dog or make them successful at being a person so narwhals exist because that tusk is super helpful well scarlet kind of we can build on that question with scarlet's question why can't everything be the same for example like why is it on a banana on an orange the same thing a crocodile or a bird or red and yellow yeah so I this is such a fun question too because there was a philosopher who lived a long time ago in ancient Greece named parmenides and parmenides thought that all differences were illusion that there was only one thing in the world and anytime you were drawing a distinction whether it was between a banana or an orange or

26:13between you and a banana right you were laboring under illusion because there was just one thing and he and some of his followers took this idea very seriously and they were not always careful for their physical safety because they believed in themselves being a kind of illusion and there was another philosopher in ancient Greece named Heraclitus who held the exact opposite view he thought that everything is constantly changing so that banana right right now is different than the way that banana will be in a few minutes which is different than the way it was last week and so he thought you can never pick up the same banana twice right as he put it he said you can never step in the same river twice because the river is always changing and I think and I think most of us think the truth is somewhere in the middle right that the banana can be the same banana even though it's changing even though it's rotting maybe and I can be the same person even though my

27:13hair gets longer or my fingernails get shorter or if you're kid you might be getting taller so I think that things can change but nevertheless be the same thing right but part of what that tells us is that what me mean by same isn't exactly the same in all ways what makes me the same person that I was last week right is probably I have the same memories and the same personality even though I don't have the same hair right my hair is a little bit longer so so that's one way to think about this question is you know we have different reasons for thinking about sameness and difference another way to think about the question is just to go back to the narwhal banana trees and orange trees come from different environments and they're different characteristics probably made them uh successful for the environments that they're in and I'm so glad that oranges are not bananas because

28:16I love oranges and I don't like bananas. Hi my name is Logan I'm six years old and I live in Austin Texas. Why are humans made out of stardust but they're not fragile? Yeah this is super cool and so let's just back up for a second what do we mean when we say we're made of stardust we're made out of atoms right and most of the atoms that exist inside our body say the carbon atoms and the nitrogen atoms they were made inside stars right stars are big nuclear reactors and they're squeezing lighter atoms into heavier atoms and some of those heavier atoms are what you need to make people so um the atoms in our body they were at the centers of stars once and that is super super cool right now we know that dust it's hard to make things out of dust it would be really fragile but what we mean when we say that we're made of stardust is just that we're made out of the same

29:19kinds of things that dust is made of we're made out of atoms and atoms can be put together in different ways and some of the ways we put them together are super strong and some of the ways we put them together are super fragile and breakable so when we put them together in glass they're easy to break and when we put them together and steal they're really hard to break and you'd probably need a chemist to come on and tell you about exactly how they fit together and which arrangements will be strong and which arrangements will be weak but we have stronger and weaker bits of us right so your muscles might be really strong uh but maybe some of your bones are weaker or maybe um your biceps are really strong but your your nose is a little bit weaker um and that's going to be because of the different arrangements of atoms in those parts of your body my name is Dexter and I'm four years old and I live in Illinois. Why do how to break?

30:21oh wow well this is kind of bringing us full circle back to the question why is why is um the world sad sometimes and I think I want to answer this question in the same way right to say well again there's always multiple questions that are that are uh you know lurking in any good question and so why do hearts break you know sometimes physical hearts break because you know the valves don't work or someone has a heart attack um and so the heart is a kind of machine that breaks down but when we talk about our hearts as people sometimes we're not talking about the thing that's beating inside us sometimes we're talking about the really important part of ourselves loves others and wants to be loved and love is this um beautiful wonderful thing um when we love somebody we want to be with them and we want to enjoy them and we want good things to happen to them and when bad things happen or when we're separated from them the other side of that love

31:25is sadness about the loss. Scott says it's not just philosophy professors who are philosophers we all wonder about these big existential questions especially kids so do you know what that means it means you are a philosopher too that's it for this episode thanks to professor scott herchivitz for contemplating the big questions with us today scott's also written a book called nasty brutish and short adventures in philosophy with my kids it's a book for adults and I really love reading it but it's all about how you kids think about these big questions and can push adults to continue thinking about them as we get older we'll include a link to the book in our show notes as always if you have a question about anything have an adult record you asking it on a smartphone using an app like voice memos then have your adults email the file to questions at but why kids dot org our show is produced by Sarah bake melody boh debt and me jane lindt home at

32:27Vermont public and distributed by PRX our video producer is joey polombo and our theme music is by Luke Reynolds if you like our show please have your adults help you give us a thumbs up or a review on whatever podcast platform you use to listen to us it helps other kids and families find us we'll be back in two weeks with an all-new episode until then stay curious from PRX