There is no such thing as an answer. Entropy ensures this. Assuming that entropy is a continuous flow process which is itself characteristically dynamic in response to the changes it incites, and that an answer is a singleton solution to a set of static conditions, the possibility of an answer impossible.
Mankind has spent a great deal of time searching for answers. Science looks for answers. Religion seeks to provide answers. Philosophy professes to examine questions so that we can understand the answers. A whole economy has been built around selling us answers that are based on question which led to solutions which have been examined by experts. But what if there are not any? What if that opening sentence is a truth?
It would be easy to classify this line of thought as destructive, pacifistic, defeatist, or even nihilistic. But maybe it is not. We are trained to seek results, little points in time when we can say that a particular statement is true, that it is a statement of fact. We seem to search for and hang on to statics, and value them when we think we have found them. Sometimes to the point of blindness.
I think that if we are to survive our future, we are going to have to adjust ourselves to a new way of thinking. We need to continually search for the properly scoped question. And a properly scoped question has no answer, only subsets of questions which drive us to discover.
Maybe the question to the answer is 'Ain't it cool to just accept that life is a strange place?' And just think, I don't need a team of experts with a team of marketing people supporting them to sell that to me. It is free, open source. I think I will stick with that... . I just ain't buying anymore... :-)
4 comments:
I'm really struggling tonight trying to find something to write about. I have done my dishes and my laundry and even cleaned my laptop keyboard in the hopes that something would come to me. This is a better catalyst than I found on the New York Times or Washington Post sites, by the way.
What you're writing about, I think, is epistomology--the nature of knowledge. How we know. In science, we "know" by exploriing the scientific method of gather data, forming a hypothesis and testing it.
You seem to be deconstructiing one of our classic ways of knowing. By positiing that "there is no such thing as an answer" you undermine a basic frame of reference.
I'm just trying to clarify here. I can barely get my head around this. I'll give you "there is no such thing as an answer" but my head spins when I think of " the little points in time when we can say a particular statement is true" Because doesn't this just lead us to Zeno's Paradox? Even as the segments get smaller, the distance between them remains infinitely large? (OK, I had to look up Zeno's Paradox on wikipedia to be sure I got this right). If space and time are infinitely divisible (I guess this is arguable), then even in those little points of time, no particular statement can be said to be true.
Which brings me back to epistimology and post modernism's take on it, which you seem to be pointing to--that there is no absolute truth.
So what are the implications of this? What would be the social, scientific, economic and cultural implications if we all said 'there are no answers to life's persistant questions".
Would it be nihilism and anarchy? Would we all go out and blow the retirement account on that convertible Audi TT that we always wanted? Might we give up on the framework of hard work and sacrifice that is part of our frontier inheritance? (More on this Frontier hypothesis in another post, I think. This _has _ been fruitful)
Or would we stop buying into the idea that if we only have one more thing, more more possession, one more answer, we would be happy. Because that's what we're looking for, isn't it? Knowledge, or more precisely, the illusion of knowledge, gives us the illusion of happiness.
If we give up on that, what are we left with? No way to be happy?
But what if we turn it around?
What if happiness is not the answer.
What if happiness were the question?
What if we lived our short lives with questions? What if we accepted that that is what we are able to do with our conscious mind. We may not be able to answer.
But we can always ask.
I was struck by a phrase you used, "illusion of happiness," which immediately brought up the following question: what is the effective difference between the illusion of happiness and happiness. If you're convinced you're happy, and behave as if you're happy, aren't you?
Another thing you state, that knowledge brings happiness, seems to me to be the opposite of what I'd expect. The phrase "ignorance is bliss" exists for a reason. Also, I've heard that there is a correlation between intelligence and depression, although I can't back that up at all.
The only reason an emotion like happiness exists is because there's some kind of reproductive advantage to having that emotion. An example would be if children didn't make you happy, you would be more prone to abandoning them and then they'd never have a chance to reproduce and pass your genes to another generation. But of course that opinion is based on the knowledge of evolution and natural selection, and if there is no real knowledge, then none of that matters anyway.
In response to Page: Undermining seems to be what is happening to a lot of what I used to think that I knew...Not a bad thing I think...
Zeno's paradox (which I knew about but had no idea had a name, thanks for that) would be a good support of my supposition. However, the thing I am aiming at here is not to provide a reason/excuse to not search for answers just because they maybe don't exist. It is more to encourage the behavior (in myself) to be more flexible in my response to questions that I or others address to me.
I think that the broader implications that you refer to (social, scientific, etc...) might experience a slowdown. We are unlikely to simply give up and toss away the future just because there are no real answers, only real questions. Conversely, I think we would be likely to re-assign happiness to the search for knowledge, and re-assign value to those material things which enhance the search, as compared to searching for ways to gain the material things. This is entirely idealistic of course, but worth examining. I doubt that we would be in any danger of our current systems falling apart because it is a lot of work to examine questions this way, and that would leave those of us that operated on the "no answer" assumption to be left way, way behind. Not a good survival trait from an individual point of view. Assuming this kind of idea did take off in some significant portion of the population though, I think we would see some very hard working, but relaxed people around.
(I hope you do post on that Frontier hypothesis!)
"The illusion of knowledge gives us the illusion of happiness". That is partially true I think. But only if we don't recognize the illusive. In that statement, happiness is only an illusion because we think we have knowledge. And, oddly enough, we actually do. It is just that we often then cling to that knowledge as if it is immortal. I propose that we(I) weight the value of that knowledge more realistically, thus allowing it to grow. I am not sure if that makes sense the way I stated it. But then, I am not sure that any of this really makes sense... :-)
Your last series of questions are going to take a long time for me to consider. There is a lot wrapped up in there! I think that what we are left with, is the only way to maintain a relatively steady state of happiness, as compared to the rather sawtooth waveform that I observe in myself and others in this society of ours, is to relax about the answers and find joy in the questions. (It is the process... sorry, had to say it)
And yes, the beauty is, we can always ask! :-) That is a good thing, I think.
someone else that thinks along these lines...
It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
- James Thurber
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