| 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 |
And it is not so obvious what they actually mean as everyone interprets it in a different way. Some people mean still existing in this "plane", some in some other reality, some mean to be reborn, some mean to trascend, some to reincarnate, some a mix of two, or of all.
If we keep pretending the question is right when it obviously lacks meaning and all the information necessary to be able to answer it we are never gonna find out.
But again, that is what some people want, for some things to always remain a mystery, so they ask paradoxical questions.
"What was I like before I was born?"