[pmoriarty]

"Are there any blue reds? We can spend a millennia thinking about it."

It's pretty obvious that you can have blue reds: they're called purples or violets. Just squeeze some blue out of a tube of paint, and then some red, mix them together and you get a blue red. You can also have a black white: it's called gray.

Anyway, I'd agree that one could ask any number of metaphysical questions, but it could be argued that only some of them would be considered "great". One (arguable) measure to use for the greatness of questions is how many people do they occupy, and how critical do they consider those questions. Whether one exists before birth or after death would be considered "great" by this measure, whether there's a blue red would not.

[redial]

Violet is not blue and it is also not red. I'm not asking for a bluish red but for a 100% blue color that it is also red.

You are misusing the language, or rather I am in this case, to ask a paradoxical question. Where are all the cat dogs? This is a never ending game because we don't agree on the language. This is exactly the realm of metaphysics.

And greatness is in the eye of the beholder. To me greatness could be quantified by how much progress has been made in answering the question. After a thousand years and possibly millions of lives wasted trying to answer "is there existence before this life?" we are not one single iota closer to an answer. That implies a pretty bad question that is not grounded in reality, or at the very least not "grammatically" grounded in reality.

[pmoriarty]

"Violet is not blue and it is also not red. I'm not asking for a bluish red but for a 100% blue color that it is also red."

If you're asking if there exists something that's 100% X at the same time as being 100% not-X, I'm not sure there's much to debate about it, as there clearly isn't (at least not in this world, where things can't seem to be themselves and not themselves at the same time).

"You are misusing the language, or rather I am in this case, to ask a paradoxical question. Where are all the cat dogs? This is a never ending game because we don't agree on the language. This is exactly the realm of metaphysics."

It's the realm of semantics (ie. definitions), but I'm not convinced that every metaphysical question could be reduced to a semantic one.

If you take the question of whether one has some sort of existence (like, say, as a "soul") before birth, I think that question would still exist even after we'd agreed on the constituent definitions. Also, I don't see anything paradoxical in that question. Even were it paradoxical, its paradoxical quality would in no way disqualify it for me. Perhaps I'd be even more interested in examining it, as examining paradoxes has been a very fruitful approach throughout human history.

"To me greatness could be quantified by how much progress has been made in answering the question. After a thousand years and possibly millions of lives wasted trying to answer "is there existence before this life?" we are not one single iota closer to an answer."

There have been answers, they just haven't satisfied everyone. The same could be said of pretty much every other great question, no matter whether the answers come from science, religion, philosophy, intuition, or elsewhere.

[redial]

> If you're asking if there exists something that's 100% X at the same time as being 100% not-X, I'm not sure there's much to debate about it, as there clearly isn't (at least not in this world, where things can't seem to be themselves and not themselves at the same time).

You found the loophole! Sad to see you abandoned so swiftly your own logic when the time came to evaluate your own statement. This is exactly why the metaphysical deals in the realm of ambiguity: once you define it in a clear and concise manner all the mystery disappears, and that to some, is no fun.

That is also why a question like “is there life after death?” is uninteresting: by definition life comes before death.

[pmoriarty]

"a question like "is there life after death?" is uninteresting: by definition life comes before death."

You're not being charitable to the questioner by interpreting it as a paradox.

Clearly, what most people intend to ask by that question is whether one can exist in some form (as a "spirit" or as "soul", or maybe come out of the VR that is the world, or in heaven even in a body like the present one or a more perfect one, or in hell, or maybe reincarnated in as another lifeform, etc) after your physical body stops functioning. There is no paradox in that.

[redial]

Not so clear, because you see, that is another question. This is why we need to define things very explicitly and then accept the implications of those definitions or we’ll never get anywhere.

Now that you accepted that there is a paradox in the original question (“is there life after death?”) you reformulated it in a way the paradox is no longer present and your meaning is less ambiguous:

“Is there something not physical that continues to exists even after the physical body no longer does?”

And that is a very interesting question, but first we have to acknowledge that it is a different question and because you asked it in a non paradoxical way it opens up avenues for exploration unavailable to the original question. I would personally start simply by asking “is there something not physical, ie. a soul, “in” a being?” That is in itself is own can of worms because even if there are “souls” they might “die” when the body does so it is not as clear cut as one might initially think, but at least is a start. I’m sure there are other approaches, but at least we should all agree: it is a different question.

My point is only unparadoxical questions can have a shot at being answered. Most of the “great questions” are paradoxes; “what came before the beginning?” sounds very profound but it will never lead anywhere, as centuries pondering it have already proven.

[pmoriarty]

If we take the following questions:

P: "Is there life after death?"

Q: "Is X the same as not-X?"

Then you could argue that question P (and all "metaphysical" questions) amounts to or really has the structure of something like question Q, and that it's therefore paradoxical, trivial, or uninteresting because the answer is obviously "no" ("by definition", as you point out).

I would disagree for the following reasons:

First, if you interrogate people who ask question P what they mean by it, you're likely to find out that they're not asking anything like question Q, but rather something like the following question:

R: "Can one continue to exist in some form after your physical body stops functioning?"

Now, it's true that question P and R are different on the surface, but when most people ask P what they mean by that question is R. So underneath the surface, at the meaning level, they intend to ask R. Question R is not paradoxical, trivial, or uninteresting, and it has no obvious answer that could be arrived at "by definition".

Second, I believe even trivial-seeming questions and paradoxes are frequently much deeper and more interesting than they appear. Careful study and analysis of them could yield profound insights and areas of future research. Witness all the progress in logic from studying paradoxes and other "trivial" corner cases (like the Liar's Paradox[1], Russell's Paradox[2], etc). From such study you get things like Paraconsistent logics[3] and dialetheism,[4] which can fruitfully deal with contradictions.

Third, even things that are "true by definition" can be useful and interesting. Wittgenstein argued that all logical truths are tautologies. Well, if so, they're still worthy of study and have proven to be interesting and useful.

Finally, I am not convinced that all, most, or even many "metaphysical" questions can be charitably reduced to paradoxes, nor that they are trivially answerable "by definition".

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar%27s_paradox

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_paradox

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraconsistent_logic

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialetheism

[mcbits]

I'm not quite sure if it works for blue and red or only certain color combinations, but it's possible to create images where an item in the scene is obviously one color, yet the light hitting the eye is another color. The brain automatically adjusts for "that's what a red object would look like in that environment," when the light coming from the photograph is actually blue.

In that way you can have a picture that's "blue red" due to perspective rather than semantics. E.g. the car in the picture is really red and the color of the ink depicting it is really blue. The red is blue.

[redial]

That is interesting, but it is also an answer to a different question. The question is "are there any blue reds?" not "can we see in some circumstances reds as blue?".

[mcbits]

I thought the question was asking whether there are any reds that are blue.

Edit: This isn't as clear as it could be if I was better with GIMP, but it should illustrate the idea. https://imgur.com/a/cRWhdTJ

[redial]

The question is "are" there any blue reds. In other words, regardless of who is watching it, or if anyone at all.

The question is not "can we perceive" some reds as blue.

[mcbits]

There are no blues or reds at all if nobody is watching. Color is a purely perceptual phenomenon relying on properties of the eye and brain.