Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

My favorite essay, entitled "Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast," comes from the chapter on logic. In it, George A. Dunn and Brian McDonald write:

When it comes to the curious conditions of Wonderland, Alice's efforts to make sense of the nonsensical pay off with dividends. But that's because the nonsense is only provisional, only on the surface, beneath which a diligent investigator like Alice is able to discern perfectly intelligible, albeit unexpected, rules of cause and effect.

[...]

Once Alice has learned what these rules are, she can count on them to operate as dependably as any of the laws of nature that obtain in our world. They only seem nonsensical to us because our experience of our world aboveground and on this side of the looking glass has burdened us with a slew of preconceptions about what can and cannot be accomplished by ingesting the caps of gilled fungi.

[…]

It is to Alice's credit that she doesn't hesitate for a moment to discard her preconceptions when she comes across situations that patently refute them. In doing so, she encounters an admirable quality to encounter reality on its own terms, a receptive cast of mind that many philosophers would include among the most important "intellectual virtues" or character traits that assist in the discovery of truth.

For a parallel meditation on the importance of being able to step away from assumption, cultivate doubt, and find pleasure in mystery, see yesterday's related exploration of the necessity for ignorance in science.