Old, Hard-to-Resolve Questions in Philosophy Are Likely Often Meaningless

Philosophy has posed questions which persist literally for millennia, being re-discovered, re-asked from different angles, and with the answers seemingly producing unsatisfying paradoxes. Often, what appear to be innovations are restatements of prior arguments, often seemingly driven by the limited group of value-sets and personality types of the thinkers approaching the topics. What is especially interesting is that these sorts of arguments are either about things that seem to bear on core aspects of human experience, and/or are high-status topics of the sort pondered by high-status people.

This is not good, and where there has been a history of this, what it suggests is either

1. We haven't yet developed the means to verify it (meaning, the logical and or physical enterprise which would allow it.)
   
   
2. The question is meaningless, and this fact has been obscured by unnecessary and/or incorrect assumptions.
   

#2 is tempting because it cuts down on work, and many examples come to mind from theology or ancient philosophy (in the Western classical era, irresistible forces meeting immovable objects; In Christian theology, resolutions of theodicy; among Taoist logicians, the logical relationship between aspects of yin or yang, e.g. what is the relationship between hard and white. Sweat and ink were spilled for century over these questions, and only with the clearing of the cultural assumptions that made them seem problematic in the first place do we stop worrying about them en masse, and realize this implies some of our current questions may be of the same type, though still obscured. But for any question where we assert #2 is the case, then the burden of proof is on the claimant to clarify the errant assumptons, and/or why the paradoxical as to either why the question is meaningless, or (more interestingly and productively) why two apparently coherent but mutually exclusive alternatives are not in fact in opposition.

It also follows for questions of the second category that there is no clear consequence from a clear resolution of the question in any direction.

In modern neuroscience and philosophy, the existence of free will is such a question.