How do we know life is not a dream?

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believe in what we do helps keep curiosity thriving. Head to buttwikids.org/donate to become a buttwifan club member or make a gift in any amount to support the show. Thanks and stay curious. This is But Why? A podcast for curious kids from Vermont Public. I'm Jane Lendon. 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? Questions 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. What's philosophy? My favorite definition of philosophy actually comes from my son from when he was in second grade. That's Scott Hirschivitz. 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. It's just to think really carefully about the problem and see what we can learn about it. Well let's 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 Leighton, I am eight years old, I live in Austin, Texas, my question is why do humans exist? My name is Leighton, I am six years old, I live in Thomong this world, I wouldn't know, what is life for? My name is Violet, I'm five years old, I live in Eglot, California,

why do people even exist? Hi this is a free, I am seven years, seven and a half, I live in Seattle, why are we here this moment and how did we exist? Yeah I think this is, um,

“such an important question and it's a question that everybody thinks about and I think there's”

different ways in which we might go and 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, it's billions and billions of light years across and there's billions

of billions of 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 that, from a star that's not even all that special

star, I think, wow, this, the whole universe couldn't really be about us, right, so I'm not sure

give our own lives a purpose and we can make meaning in our lives, so that's a distinction

floss for 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 to your relationships, with your family and your friends, it might be meaning that you find in work that you do, right, maybe 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. Hmm, 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 but 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 immortal, 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 artist 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 at 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 youth old, I've gone inside 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 behind 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 philosophers like to use the word goodwill they'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

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 in our life because we really want to 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 or 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 to wonder whether you should be spending”

so much time on things like your job or the dishes or laundry maybe those actually aren't the

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

essence is form remains a big mystery. Yeah it's a 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 is between the stuff that we're made out of and the minds that we have. So some people think that our minds just are our brains 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 now it's big for a month 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 that there's an ancient Taoist text called the Jwangji where a man named Jwangju said one day he dreamed he was a butterfly floating and floating around and then he woke up and he was solid unmistakable Jwangju but

he wondered whether he was Jwangju who dreamed he was a butterfly or whether he was a butterfly who dreamed he was Jwangju 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 I'm happy with the way things are or at the

but that doesn't mean I should question everything all the time my name is Mughal 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 loft and 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 we're 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 behave 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 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 years 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 like 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 make 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 Herschivitz 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 Herschivitz 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 that'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 not 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 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 right why do we want to paint

doing as far back as we know they're 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 there 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 you can just be fun and we don't need to ask why do it and have an answer in 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 them mean six seven so much why do six and exist why does six seven exist and why does the six seven kid exist oh well I 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 to 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 the 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 to me reminds me too yes that playfulness but also that kids have some power in the world to 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

my name is Omyra I'm fine I live in everyone's Washington how can adults be real

if you've never seen a narwhal it's a kind of a whale that lives in very very cold ocean waters

and it has a long tusk sticking straight out of its head there are amazing looking animals and some day 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 in 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 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 all 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 and so that's the 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 the at being a narwhal or make them successful it being a dog or make them successful it 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

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 between you in 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 hair 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 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 their different characteristics probably made them successful for the environments that they're in and I'm so glad that oranges are not bananas

because I 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 star dust 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 star dust

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 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 star dust is just that we're made out of the same kinds of things that dust is made of or 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 in some of the ways we put them together super fragile and breakable so when we put them together in glass they're easy to break and when we put them together and steel they're really hard to break and you

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 but maybe some of your bones or weaker or maybe your biceps or really strong but your nose is a little bit weaker and that's going to be because of the different arrangements of atoms in those parts of your body. My name is Dex stuff and I'm

four years old and I'm working over and I do how to break. Oh wow well this is kind of bringing us

“full circle back to the question why why is 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 you know lurking in any good question and so why do heartbreak you know sometimes

and so the heart is a kind of machine that breaks down but when we talk about our hearts is 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 that 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 is 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 Hershevitz 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 whykids.org our show is produced by Sarah Baker, Melody Bodet and me Jane Lindholm at Vermont Public and distributed by PRX our video producer is Joey Palombo 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.