What questions are worth asking?
From time to time I would like to share here a question, which I think is worth thinking about.
Asking the right question is a difficult problem. You don't wanna ask trivial questions, because you wouldn't learn anything from answering them. Too difficult questions also don't do any good, because you can get stuck with them for a long time without any guarantee of learning something. What's the meaning of life? - I don't know.
One promising idea is that the ideal question should be the easiest one which you are yet not able to answer (Schmidhuber, 2011). The reasoning behind it looks like this: if you can find the answer, you must have learned something, and if you can't, you wouldn't be better off by trying anything else, because this is the easiest question.
It is nice that we defined what we are looking for, but what about how we should find it? I think we could break this down into these two subproblems:
- How do you know a question is the simplest one and there is no other, which would be even simpler? (talking about the unanswered ones)
- Is there a global minimum in the space of all possible unanswered questions and their difficulties? In other words, is there a single simplest question? And if not, which one of the many simplest questions is the best to start with?
Looks like there might be a pattern, doesn't it? We started with one difficult question and now we have another two, hopefully less difficult, questions.
Another problem is that the difficulty of questions is subjective. A question hard for one might be quite easy for another. Which brings us to an idea that there might be two kinds of questions: the ones worth answering and the others, more interesting for me personally, worth asking.
Let me expand on this. For the first kind of question the value lays in their answers. What do I need for cooking ham & eggs? While questions of the second kind are those which nobody else but me can answer. Or maybe somebody could, but it wouldn't help me much, because it is much more valuable for me to think about the question and eventually find the answer myself. The process of finding the answer is valuable itself, because it pushes me to explore all the alternatives, understand them, and only in the end pick the most suitable answer.
Also the first kind of questions can be easily empirically verified (just follow the recipe and try cooking some ham & eggs), while the second one can't. That's why it's important to answer them ourselves, because who else should we trust?
Ok, for some questions it looks like we'd better do the work ourselves. But can we help each other somehow? I think we can. What I'd like to do is share interesting questions, discuss them, and take inspiration from each other. What do you think?
I have to say that I am not entirely sure what the message is. There are so many things mixed in. The whole topic is interesting, though, and pretty complex I guess. I am sure that the context will be more clear when the questions start to come in :-)
When I am at it, I think that the context where we are asking the question really matters, doesn't it? In formal logic a statement can be true, false, independent, contradiction and what not and it only depends on the underlying theory. But logic is a funny thing. As one of our university professors used to say during the introduction to logic: "All pink elephants in this room have wings and they can dive like a submarine." And he was right! :-)
Leaving the formal part behind and going a bit closer to humans, I remember a story of Carl Gustav Jung travelling around Africa. He was researching what people there think about what they actually use for thinking. He asked a local chief and the chief was surprised to be asked such an obvious question. He pointed to his heart.
This seems pretty interesting to me. Talking about questions, is there actually any common context for all humans to base their answers on? Is it even worth it to be asking deep questions and expecting someone else to give us the answer? How to approach the questions that cannot be answered in words? There are all these Zen stories that came to existence for this purpose. You hear a story, something clicks and you are enlightened. A great mystery, that a story can tell so much and hit your soul directly.
Anyway :-) I agree that the process of questioning and trying to find the answer is probably the most interesting part. And it is more fun the deeper you go. You may think that you have arrived to the final and stable conclusion. Now you know what the true purpose of life is. But then someone comes, or an experience comes, and it completely shatters your story and your mental map collapses like a house of cards. Damn, I got trapped in ideas again, unable to see the truth, but I will try better next time! And a month later, you are again watching your personal story fall to pieces. Hahahah. Very funny and the most horrific thing at the same time.
I am wondering what is there at the end. Is there DA TRUTH? Do you find the answer? Or do you stop asking questions? Where are we actually trying to get? Describe the process? Then what? Ask more questions? Why not to ask the most difficult questions first? Then what? Why am I being pushed into this never-ending process of thinking and researching and why some people don't give a shit? What is there to find? Something? Nothing? What does it mean to be lost? Is there anything like being lost? Am I being lost? Is everyone except me lost? Did everyone find the truth? How come my truth is not your truth? What is truth then? Mine? Yours? Both? Neither?
This is the moment to shut up, sit down, take a deep breath and start meditating I guess :D
I described here some of the assumptions I made in the original post. From them it follows that the only universal context for the whole humanity is the reality itself, because any other context is subjective. I also touched the "my truth != your truth" problem. Hope my explanation won't create even more confusion :-)
About asking the most difficult question first, I think you would get stuck pretty early. It seems to me that a good approach might be to always have a whole spectrum of unanswered questions, with increasing difficulty. Some of which could be addressed today, some within a week, within a month, year, lifetime (the exponential increase is intentional), as long as there are some left unanswered.
Nobody knows what the reality is actually, you can ask any quantum physician :-) I have been reading, though, about what this common ground could be and it seems that it could be consciousness itself. Some people are talking about changing the current paradigm to put consciousness above matter. Doesn't even seem to be anything new really. Peter Russell gate a rather interesting talk about this.
Talking about the sorting of questions, for me it seems that there are multiple completely different types of questions so to say. For example talking about consciousness, how do you want to touch that field without simply using your consciousness and nothing else? These questions are completely different from those answerable using mere words to me. And researching consciousness is a funny thing. You never know what and when is going to happen. Try to come up with a sorting :-)
Neither :)
Love Schmidhuber!
To my mind the most interesting questions are those that cut to the heart of the existing world-view framework. So, unless threatened, one should go directly to things like philosophy, science and information-theory and ask systematic questions there to challenge ones overall view of the world and update it to be able to predict everything that happens. This will also allow one to create anything and travel anywhere.
Posted about some of Schmidhuber's other ideas here :)
If you are going to ask questions, you must first check the assumptions implicit in your question.
For example, all of the questions you posed implicitly assume one answer. They also assume that it is possible to know when a question has been answered. If you accept that there may be many answers and that no answer is ever final then the question becomes how do you actually move forward and make progress? What happens when two different answers are contradictory?
I agree, tracking down and explicitly stating all the assumptions is very important. It always reveals a lot about the structure of the problem and can help you move forward. However, my goal here was actually to pose more questions than answers and seed a discussion. Usually people avoid hard questions, but I see many clever people around here, so it's a great opportunity to discuss unusual things.
Let me think more about the implicit assumptions in my questions and I will write about them later.
I described some of the implicit assumptions in a new post, as it got too long.I'll try to address the other questions:
All questions are conditioned on the knowledge of the person, who is asking. The optimal answer depends on the person's knowledge and the question. I see the answer as a tool for setting the questioner's mind in a different state. I guess there might be many different answers, which can have the same effect.
Everyone has their own value function, which determines, whether the question is answered sufficiently. And of course, this value function is also conditioned on it's owner's current knowledge, which means that when the knowledge is updated, the value function can change it's output - that's when you realize that you understand nothing and you have to dig deeper.
I'll have to make another post for this.. :)
Well I sketched out one possibility in the OP, but I think I will have to address the question above first for it to make sense.
I believe the biggest value of posing the right questions is not to receive the "right answer", but to trigger the "right discussion"
You learn the most through having your own ideas shattered, because you're forced to reevaluate your standpoint. You either change your view based on the arguments provided (even though this is a really complicated process and people are usually not really capable of doing this) or you at least have to find more supportive arguments for your position.
Also the voting system could help us with finding of the "right" answer, even though I believe there are little areas where you would find one correct answer. The votes will be also good in depicting the scale of "correctness" of the answers.
Exactly! That's what I'm hoping for.
Maybe you choose the answer that support the previous implicit assumptions. Every philosophy is based on some fundamental assumption, and the reasoning becomes circular at some stage. At least thats my experience.
I'm going to follow you
good article!
Hey hr1,
I asked myself some important questions a few years back. The first one basically came down to this (excuse me if it sounds preachy or proselytizing):
Why do we eat animals?
I asked this question of myself when I was confronted with a barrage of information that showed what happened to the animals before they arrived on my plate. It was gruesome and horrific.
Many people believe (and I did, too) that eating animals was required for a healthy life. When I asked those questions and began searching to see if we did NEED animals for good health, the evidence was overwhelmingly NO, we don't.
Without completely unpacking the entire argument and series of questions around this issue I decided to give up eating animals and their byproducts until I could find a reasonable and justifiable reason to do so. I haven't found a good reason yet, so I haven't eaten meat, eggs or dairy products knowingly for about 4 years.
I am so glad I found your blog, hr1. I love critical thinking and enjoy robust conversation and engagement.
I'll be following. Thanks again for your contributions.
Warm regards,
Nick
"if you can find the answer, you must have learned something" I like this sentence, it inspires me
There is certainly one single answer - "Thank you" .....
Sorry what was the question again ?
Dear @hr1 i wanted to thank you again for keeping me so long on your upvote list- Your constant votes for me brought me my starting capital here on steem, you normally were the biggest donator - this is great ;)
It was you too, who keep my interest alive in steemit for beginners- Have a good weekend & c u along the steemit highways. Greetz.