Hamburgers and Philosophy

With Claire off at a camp, I had Molly to myself tonight. We stopped by Wataburger at her special request and took it for a picnic on the way home.

At the Whataburger, Molly launched two riddles at me.

The first was “Are there more wheels or doors?” I asked, “Do you mean, like, in the whole world?”. “Yep!” she said.

Looking out at the parking lot and street, I initially said, “It’s got to be wheels.” But Molly pointed out that while every car has four wheels, it has four doors too. And the office building across the streets easily had hundreds of doors. And cabinets. Also, something about legos. πŸ€·πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ

I was convinced. Doors it is!

At the park, Molly asked if water is wet.

Again, my initial instinct was wrong. πŸ˜†. “Of course it’s wet. It’s water.” After some discussion and demonstrations on the picnic table and sidewalk, we decided that water is not wet because “wet” describes a liquid sticking to a solid. Since water is already a liquid, it cannot be wet.

We googled it and found that “Liquid water is not itself wet, but can make other solid materials wet.” 🀯

Finally, I attempted to “get” Molly with the Dichotomy Paradox, which basically says that in theory, you can never walk from one point to another because no matter how far you go, you always still have halfway to go. πŸ€·πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Real-world experiments showed that this is obviously false in the real world but true in math. Hmm. πŸ€”

Anyways, it was fun goofing around talking philosophical πŸ’© with Molly on this beautiful spring evening.

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