 The humble Rubik's Cube can teach us something profound about the world. Since its invention in 1974, the cube has created a passionate following. We enthusiasts even have a name, cubists. Once you know the secret, solving a Rubik's Cube is very relaxing and satisfying. It's kind of like a mental massage for people on the OCD spectrum. But besides a hobby, the cube can serve as a tool for philosophy, like anything else once you begin to understand its underlying abstract principles. The Rubik's Cube can teach us about logic, the nature of paradoxes, and even the differences between rationalism and empiricism. To learn from the cube, we have to dive into the world of abstractions, and we have to start at the very beginning. What is a Rubik's Cube? Well, it's simple. It's a puzzle. It's an assortment of pieces that are out of order, and it's the human mind's job to put them back into order. So a scrambled Rubik's Cube appears to be in a state of patternless and senseless disorder, and a solved Rubik's Cube makes ordered sense. Each color is isolated to its own side. The human mind, as I've written about before, is the tool which turns the former into the latter. This pattern is not unique to the Rubik's Cube. It's what puzzles are all about. Jigsaw puzzles, Sudoku, crosswords, etc. So entertain the first analogy. This pattern of turning senseless into sensible is similar to using language. Humans create sounds with their vocal chords, but those sounds aren't nearly sounds. In the right pattern, they become meaningful. Take the sentence, for example. Cat the the over-jumped chair. Now, in this order, the sentence is a kind of language fail. It doesn't mean anything. But what if you treat it like a puzzle? Just rearrange the parts and see what happens. We get the cat jumped over the chair. Now, those are the exact same words. They're just arranged in a different order. But the second time, it means something. Our ears might hear the same sounds, but in this order, sensibility is brought into existence. Communication happens. It's like the words in the sentence are the individual cubes on a Rubik's Cube. Simply twist and turn the cube, change the order of words in a sentence, and you create something sensible. So keep this analogy in mind. It directly applies to the existence of paradoxes, and we'll return to it later. This is a true story. The Rubik's Cube was kind of an accident. It wasn't created as a toy. In the 70s, a Hungarian professor named Erno Rubik created the cube as a tool to teach students about spatial relationships. And at some point, he accidentally scrambled the cube too much and couldn't get it unscramble. He worked on it for over a month before he figured out how to unscramble it. And then he realized he had created something special. It's now considered to be the world's best-selling toy. But put yourself back in the 1970s before anybody had solved the Rubik's Cube. It was an open question whether or not such a thing was even solvable by a human. The reason is because of simple mathematics. There are about 43 quintillion possible combinations for the Rubik's Cube, making it virtually impossible to unscramble by chance. Erno discovered a method of sorting through the combinations. He'd solve the corner pieces first and then put the middle or edge pieces in the proper place. And it worked. But since the 1970s, people have developed very complex and accelerated ways to solve the cube. The best speed cubers, as they're called, are able to solve it easily in under 10 seconds. So consider this question. Can every possible scramble of the Rubik's Cube be solved? All 43 quintillion combinations. Now there are two answers to that question. Both equally profound. Yes and no. We'll start with yes first. Regardless of how you scramble the cube, it can always be solved. It is a logical and mathematical necessity. I know it with certainty and so can you. But think for a moment how remarkable this is. How is it possible to know such a thing? Surely all possible combinations have not actually been solved. That data set is too big. So to what am I appealing to know with certainty that the cube can always be solved? The answer is what I keep talking about. Logic. If you start with a solved Rubik's Cube, you can scramble it for the rest of your lifetime. And just before you die, I guarantee you it can be solved. Even though that particular scramble has likely never been solved before. This holds true for larger cubes too. They don't simply make three by threes. Four by fours, seven by sevens in the current world record at the time of writing this article is 17 by 17, which you can watch being solved online. But here's the underlying truth. You could have a Rubik's Cube the size of the solar system. And I know it is solvable in theory. Even if it wouldn't be possible to solve it in practice, given the amount of work it would take to solve such a thing, you can still know it's solvable in principle. This way of reasoning is analogous to rationalism. It's understanding the abstract principles of a thing and regardless of the empirical data arriving at true conclusions. In fact, even if all your evidence points to the fact that the Cube has never been solved, you can still know it's solvable. Once we understand the logic behind the Cube, we simply don't need to appeal to empirical data. Every move that can be made can be made in reverse. This is also why sound, mathematical reasoning, is so profound. It's true, applicable to the real world and not dependent on empirical evidence. It too is an extension of pure logic. The Rubik's Cube is a great analogy to critical reasoning in general, returning to our language analogy. If you start with a sensible sentence, regardless of its length, it doesn't matter how long you scramble the words or how senseless the resulting combination of words appears, it can be unscrabbled into something sensible. The same is true of our concepts. If we start with sensible concepts, it doesn't matter how much you scramble them. Hide them, obfuscate and confuse them. If you have the patience, you can return to sensibility. Now, as I've written about before, there's a large group of people who object to this kind of sensibility. I call them irrationalists. They desperately want to find some scramble of words or concepts that is inherently contradictory. They argue that, ah, this scramble can never be solved, that it's because our reason and logic itself is limited and flawed. Then they almost inevitably will appeal to the liar's paradox or quantum physics to prove their claims. This mistake is no different than the child who scrambles a Rubik's cube for a month and concludes, ah, my goodness, this time it's really unsolvable. Nobody could ever make sense of what I've done. This cube is now beyond comprehension. They, like the child, do not understand the nature of logic. It doesn't matter how long you scramble. It doesn't matter if you're able to even solve it in a lifetime. It can certainly be solved. The philosopher's job is to solve the puzzle, sit down and sort through the concepts one by one, twisting and turning the figurative cube until things finally get cleared up and make sense again. Ah, if only things were so easy. This analogy goes even deeper. Remember the question, can all possible scrambles be solved? One can accurately answer, no. How is this possible? It's possible if you start with an unsolvable Rubik's cube in the first place. Rubik's cubes can be disassembled. Then when they're reassembled, you can place pieces into positions that they otherwise could never get in, creating an unsolvable scramble. In other words, if you break the rules from the beginning and start with a tainted cube, you won't be able to solve it. So in actuality, the total possible combinations for a Rubik's cube is not 43 quintillion. It's about 519 quintillion, only one-twelfth of which are actually solvable. So does that throw a wrench into everything I just claimed? What if paradoxes are like an unsolvable scramble? It doesn't matter how long you twist and turn, according to your logical rules, the puzzle is inherently unsolvable. Could reality be filled with such irrational scrambles? Well, not at all. Think once more about our language analogy. We know we can unscramble the words the cat jumped over the chair. Regardless of their combination. But that's only because we're starting with a sensible sentence. What if we start with a nonsensical sentence to begin with? If we start with a broken Rubik's cube, if you will. Take the words belonging walnut, 16 potent under. By George, we've created an unsolvable scramble. It doesn't matter how long we twist and turn these words. We will never make sense of them. But so what? Only a fool would conclude, ah, this combination of words is inherently senseless. Therefore, reality is paradoxical. Unsolvable scrambles simply demonstrate that you've started with an error from the beginning, and it is precisely the error in the liar's paradox. This sentence is false. It merely appears to be sensible, and as I have explained, it actually isn't. It's nonsense, not because reality is nonsensical, but because the sentence is flawed from the beginning. Seeking out true paradoxes or true conclusions because of the sentence construction is like saying, if we can find a nonsensical way to assemble these words or assemble these concepts, then we will prove that reality itself doesn't make sense. It's a fool's errand, to say the least. It's not difficult to create a nonsensical string of words, and it's not difficult to disassemble the Rubik's cube into something that isn't solvable. Doing so is not profound. It's irrelevant. It's just creating gibberish. There wasn't something sensible to begin with in the first place. One final analogy. Right after Erno Rubik created his cube, but before it had been solved the first time, he was in an incredibly unique position. He was the only person who saw the cube ordered properly from the beginning. He could know, though nobody else could, that the cube was actually solvable because he saw it assembled the right way. In a sense, he knew the answer from the beginning. And the same is possible in philosophy. How do we know reality was assembled the right way from the beginning? Perhaps things only appear sensible, but we'll discover that we're living inside of some unsolvable scramble. This is the profound understanding you gain grasping the nature of logic. The principles of logic are necessary and inescapable. It's not an open question whether reality is inherently contradictory. Things must be exactly the way they are, and they couldn't be any other possible way. This is why I write so much about logic. It lets you know the answer from the beginning. The law of identity, that A is A, a thing is a thing, it is what it is, is a necessary and universal truth. And when you understand why, it's exactly like seeing the Rubik's Cube in its fully solved state. Thus, at the beginning of any philosophic journey, one must begin with logic. It is the objective standard to which everything else appeals. It gives certain insight into the nature of all paradoxes. They are all just a matter of unscrambling language to reveal errors. So, what appears to be a simple puzzle can be turned into a powerful tool for understanding language, paradoxes, and even the nature of reality itself.