Sensible Questions

How much does an average African elephant weigh? If I tell you it weighs eight tons, you might not know if I'm correct, but you would probably think that my answer sounds reasonable in the way that the answer lemon chicken does not.

If I ask you a harder question, what kind of government or governments will the Iraq region have in ten years time? Then you will still be able to distinguish a possibly correct answer, such as Stalinist Monarchy, from an answer that could not possibly be correct, such as erotic aardvark.

However there are some questions for which all answers could be said to be equally valid. For example if I asked, "What is the meaning of life?" the answers lemon chicken or erotic aardvark seem to make as much sense as any others that have been advanced. Similar questions for which there are no classes of answers that we could could define as reasonable or unreasonable would be, "What is my purpose?" or, "Who am I?" Apart from reasons of convenience, Ronald Brak doesn’t seem to be a better answer to the question, "Who am I?" than erotic aardvark.

So what do I recommend when faced with a question for which no type of answer could be said to be correct or incorrect? My advice is to forget about it. Of course if you enjoy pondering it, then go ahead. But as people have been arguing over these sorts of things for thousands of years, be aware that you are extremely unlikely to come up with anything better than lemon chicken.