Did you have Philosophical thoughts before the age of Five?

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whitedragon flys
can she be remembered
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Last edited by syzygyish on 28 Jan 2008, 8:27 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Last edited by whitedragon on 01 Feb 2008, 9:19 pm, edited 3 times in total.

I looked up at the stars and wondered at age 3 (before I learned everything related to astronomy)

When I was little I rationalized the Santa thing by thinking Santa didn't really live at the North Pole but instead was a wealthy owner of a toy factory in Greenland that donated Christmas presents as charity and that "Santa" was a title passed down in the family when the owner died. I thought the mall Santas were people who got the data for what toys and games were popular.

i remember asking mine that same thing lol

I'm not the only one? Hooray!
I remember having these huge thougths while driving past this undeveloped lot full of trees. I remember I wanted to know why the universe and numbers go on forever, and whether it was possible to get to the farthest point of forever, where it was just expanding, like there was some sort of line, and what was there before it expanded. I also came up with this complex theory of how life came to exist, something to do with people flying down from somewhere else if I remember correctly. I also had a theory about how there are different entrances to heaven, and that you can go in whatever way you want to, because you can design the door yourself.

My first “philosophical” thought occurred when I first learned to count. I remember asking my mom what the highest number anyone had ever counted to was. LOL. I think she told me something to the effect that numbers keep going on forever. I then wondered how we could have given them all names within a finite time. Did numbers nobody had ever named really exist? My moms answer was something like “only God knows the names of all the numbers, he has given them all names”.

I don’t remember what age I was. Probably around 5.

I dont remember having any before I was 5, but I may have done. I became an atheist at age 8 after blindly believing in God (taught at school like maths and english, so of course I believed it all). Can remember the conversation about God very clearly, so it must have had a big effect on me. I have one prelinguistic memory and I can remember what that felt like, which makes me realise that language is really not necessary for complex thought.

Yesterday I finally remembered one thing. . .

It's, I guess, from some pre-kindergarden time; when I spent a lot of time at home.

There was a time I would yell insults at the TV screen and wondered why the news broadcast guy would just go on impervious.
Shortly after that I learnt of the existance of cameras and how the whole thing worked.

I seemed to have equated sight with self-awareness or was doing something of the sort and wondered why, whether and to what extent a TV camera would be the closest thing to a self-aware robot.
Albeit mistaken, maybe that was indeed a very early shot at that kind of thinking.

"Why am I here?" was my first philosophical thought. I must have been four and a half at the time. I remember thinking that I must have been brought into the world for a purpose - some task I was meant to fulfill, that I would be told about sooner or later.

surely you did pascals wager on belief in santa claus

surely you did pascals wager on belief in santa claus

I vividly remember wondering if all living things were alive the same way I'm alive and if they are, do they percieve things the way I do. That led me to wonder if all living things are all really the same conciousness that takes turns at different points in time. In other words, I go on living as me, but then time rewinds and I live as someone else who can interact with me thinking I'm someone separate, and that keeps extending to every other living thing. I also thought alot about infinity, and even applied it to this, can infinity happen all at once at the same time? Is time just something unchangeable that works exactly the way we percieve it? I didn't use very many words in these imaginings, but the meaning of the questions were still there.

I think most people are the most philisophical before they begin their formal education, just aspies seem to have more vivid memories than average.

Last edited by Pithlet on 31 Jan 2008, 12:13 am, edited 1 time in total.

I dont know what age I was but I remember wondering whether anyone else was real, or whether I was the only real, thinking, feeling person. Remember also being rather disappointed to realise that I wasnt the only person who had thought of this.

Me too! I used to torment the youth pastor with questions about the inconsistencies in the bible - I actually made him cry when I was nine.

I definitely didn't buy into Santa. I knew he wasn't real by age 3 and as a consequence I was terrified of shopping center Santas for years - there's a photo of me age 4 standing in front of Santa and crying. No power on earth could have got me onto his lap

I spent most of my primary school days debating the existance of god and I devoted an inordinate amount of time to wondering whether everyone elses perceptions are the same as mine - if I were looking through your eyes would the things I see as green look the way I see red things? Just because we have a consensus that such and such impulse means such and such that doesn't necessarily mean that we percieve the same stimulus in the same way. This lead me to a realisation about the frailty of existence and the complete lack of any way to check our perceptions against any objective standard. When I was 8 I was completely terrified that I could simply be asleep or hallucinating in a coma and never know it. I also used to worry that if I stopped thinking I would stop existing. Theres a family joke that anyone getting too heavily into philosophy is going to have an existential emergency.