Where do questions come from?
Why do we ask questions? It is in our nature to ask questions,
and it is very evident from early childhood till old age. We
never stop asking questions, and we start the very second we
cam, often with a simple why. Is it answers we seek, yes of
course it is, what else could it be? Life is a search for
knowledge and it is different for all of us. Some ask questions
that haven't been asked before, some ask questions in specific
topics, some just want to know everything, I fall into this last
category. Our desire to learn is one of our fundamental
strengths. No matter our situation, we are always asking new
questions or finding better answers to old questions. Without
this desire the human race would be much worse off, and it
should not be taken for granted that we are such in inquisitive
race. Imagine we never bothered asking why people get sick, we
may have stumbled across penicillin anyway, but would we have
cared? We'd still be living in the dark ages if it weren't for
our reliable desire to expand our knowledge, and that's what a
question is, a method to expanding ourselves. It may be hard to
envision an intelligent race that would not question the world
around them, but it doesn't seem that unlikely to me. We could
have easily made life simple and begun to coast. Why bother
striving for better, or more, when what you have right now is
pretty good? Does the fact that we continue on, make us selfish?
We don't answer questions, or ask them for that matter, for
selfish reasons, yes there is often a net gain once we've
answered a new question but that's not our goal. If it was we
wouldn't ask questions about Mars, or various stars, or anything
else that won't immediately help us. The greatest minds of the
entire human race are known for their minds because they asked
questions others would not ask. Da Vinci asked why humans could
not fly, he might not have been as successful as he would have
liked, but human do tend to fly quite a bit nowadays. Newton
asked why an apple would have the inclination to attack him.
Einstein asked the toughest question we've ever answered, what
is light. These are not questions that needed to be answers, the
desire to know the answers came from somewhere else. But where?
Evolution is generally accepted as something that occurs to our
physical nature. It includes expansions to our minds, the
ability to reason for instance (although that particular answer
is argued quite a bit). The questions we ask may or may not be
considered a part of evolution, it depends how much of our
existence is natural and how much is synthetic. Is everything
nature, do the decisions we make, the questions we ask, are they
all just part of who we are, or do we expand ourselves without
help from mother nature? Is asking a question as much a part of
us as carrying a piece of food back to the hill a part of being
an ant? Or does the question asking come from a different part
of us, a part that's beyond the natural world? Most of us assume
the latter, otherwise we'd consider cars and industry a part of
the natural world. Something seperates us and our drive to learn
more about the world around us is on the side we consider our
own. So if asking questions are not just an evolutionary quirk
to our human nature, where else could is come from? I wish I
knew. I may not have all the answers, yet, but one thing I know
for sure, I won't stop till I get all the answers or I die. If I
ever do get all the answers the first thing I'm going to do is
start looking for more questions.