First principles and asking why

I was in a supermarket recently, and at the other end of the aisle I could hear a parent getting continually more frustrated. What should have been a relatively simple trip to purchase some groceries had been turned into a consistent barrage of questions. Their young child had entered the why stage. No action or decision was safe from the dreaded why.

Why were they going down this particular aisle? Why was it cold in this part of the supermarket? Why does cheese need to be refrigerated after all? No topic was taboo. Parents who are unable to deal with the persistent barrage of whys find the dialogue drifting off into the absurd, where they find themselves explaining why trollies have wheels, why shops exist, and why we even need to eat food in the first place. Why? Why?!

Adults find this behavior incredibly annoying. Children in the why phase manage to highlight just how much of the world that we, as adults, don’t tend to spend too much time thinking about. As we age, we reason at ever more abstract levels that we don’t need to be concerned with. For example, we don’t care exactly how a car is put together — we just drive it. This ability to think abstractly and to build upon abstract concepts with even more abstract concepts has allowed the human race to flourish. Right now I’m not thinking at all about how my keyboard works, or how my operating system works, or…