The most basic question is this, 'What?'. What precedes Why and How, before we ask why and how, we ask what first. But the most basic question is the most troubling of all questions. People can ask 'Why life' and go on to work and do their daily activities. People can ask 'How life' and do not even think about life anymore when they carry out their daily life. However when we ask what is life, we stop our daily life for a moment for we are questioning the most basic foundation of our daily life.
What can take many disturbing forms. The big questions like 'What is eternity and death' can trouble us greatly for we fear the unknown and the abyss. But seemingly simpler questions can be equally troubling 'What is yesterday?' Is it a real thing? Or is it just mere memory? What if yesterday does not exist, what if movement and change from yesterday is just mere illusion. 'What is the present?' Is it the only thing that is real? Is it the only place that i exist in? 'What is tomorrow? Is it just an empty thought? Does it exist, or will it exist? The existence and the possibility of non-existence of the yesterday and the tomorrow is equally unknown and disturbing to us as the existence and the possibility of non-existence of eternity and death.
The permutation of the four concepts can be more perplexing.
1 What if yesterday is death
2 What if yesterday is eternity
3 What if tomorrow is death
4 What if tomorrow is eternity
And i end this with a question, 'If we can accept the equally ambiguous tomorrow, why can't we accept eternity and death.
Friday, 24 April 2015
Friday, 17 April 2015
A Question Begets Questions
Greggory in his introduction asked the question,
if it was truly necessary to be socially content, what can be discussed to cook up better conversations?
Of course our wise and critical readers would stop reading for a moment and reflect on the conditional that the question posed. So the statement "If it was truly necessary to be socially content" makes the readers think of what is meant by being socially content. At least that was the first question that comes to my mind. What is social contentment? Is it a satisfaction that we derive from social connections (What really do we derive, do we derive an object or a change in our being)? Or is it a satisfaction that we derive from the knowledge of ourselves having social connections? After all what is social connections, does it exist as an object and hence can be possessed (if it does not, the satisfaction we derive from the knowledge of having that is a mere illusion don't you think?) , or is it just a man made idea describing existing things named persons? Of course before we ask all of this we must ask, what is contentment? But that would be a really hard thing to define, and we still have a huge number of questions even if we accept on the surface that there is such a thing called contentment that all of us have the same idea of.
Well, moving on to another part of the conditional, "if it was truly necessary". Why do you think that social contentment is necessary at all? Is it because we are social beings? Is it because we exist in relation to others? And more perplexing still is the phrase "truly necessary", it is a grand statement don't you think? Does necessary mean that it is not contingent, not contingent to the human nature (while humans themselves are contingent being)? Maybe not that necessary, not as necessary as a necessary Being? Well, to what level is it necessary then? Do you think the word Truly here imply a connection to The True itself? So many questions did this one question beget. And we have not even look at his sons from his second wife whose name was "what can be discussed to cook up better conversations", maybe next time.
Wednesday, 15 April 2015
Of Ideas in Small Talks
How generic can your daily conversation be?
In fulfilling our need for social interaction, often we resort to trivia: weather, cars, haircuts, bosses and colleagues, and so on. Yet it is also undeniably true that if the conversation were merely a talk to kill time, we wouldn't want to spend a lot of time thinking about what to say, and instead pick up a topic that's related or merely close to where you are or who you are with: weather, cars, haircuts, bosses and colleagues. Hence, your conversation topic revolves around the arbitrary conditions that are neither absolute nor eternal - thus the discussion is insignificant. You feel that you are wasting your time socializing, or at least that's what it is usually like for me. Then a question comes to mind: if it was truly necessary to be socially content, what can be discussed to cook up better conversations?
The answer is: two random concept brought together in a question. Throw it into a group of unique personalities and you get an elaborate discussion.
Take an example of how this blog comes about. It was dinner time, and this group of people, off from work, decided to have yet another dinner at the McDonalds. They were totally minding their own business, eating their hard-earned fast foods when one little bastard came up with two concepts - "pursuit of happiness" and "evolutionary advantage" - and made it a question: is the pursuit of happiness an evolutionary advantage? Then it happened: a clash of opinions, inspections on definitions from each other, conversation like never before. And when the clock forcefully brought us the farewells of the day, they thought of making their discussion more concrete: a web log.
The Questioners' Queue, then, is a platform for us to ask questions of all variety, from different perspective, to all that may read and respond. Yet it is also a platform to record our discussion, our attempts to answer these questions.Last year, I encountered an internet comic pointing out that questions are much more important than answers, for quite a list of reasons. Personally, I believe that questions and their answers have a more dynamic relations: an answered questions may or may not lead to another question, while an unanswered ones are leading us to questions regarding the foundation of our understanding. One cannot evolve without another, and hence it is important to keep eyes on both new questions and creative answers. However, as questions may be asked faster than it can be pondered over and answered satisfyingly, the evolution of questions and answer is not at an equilibrium, and questioners need to line up and wait for their answers.
Therefore, be prepared for discussions that attempts to transcend many ideas with questions all over the topic, which may and may not have an attempt at an answer. As readers, it is also possible to have your own questions answered, just by contacting one of the authors. Lastly, know that our discussion may not be interesting to everyone, but should it be?
In fulfilling our need for social interaction, often we resort to trivia: weather, cars, haircuts, bosses and colleagues, and so on. Yet it is also undeniably true that if the conversation were merely a talk to kill time, we wouldn't want to spend a lot of time thinking about what to say, and instead pick up a topic that's related or merely close to where you are or who you are with: weather, cars, haircuts, bosses and colleagues. Hence, your conversation topic revolves around the arbitrary conditions that are neither absolute nor eternal - thus the discussion is insignificant. You feel that you are wasting your time socializing, or at least that's what it is usually like for me. Then a question comes to mind: if it was truly necessary to be socially content, what can be discussed to cook up better conversations?
The answer is: two random concept brought together in a question. Throw it into a group of unique personalities and you get an elaborate discussion.
Take an example of how this blog comes about. It was dinner time, and this group of people, off from work, decided to have yet another dinner at the McDonalds. They were totally minding their own business, eating their hard-earned fast foods when one little bastard came up with two concepts - "pursuit of happiness" and "evolutionary advantage" - and made it a question: is the pursuit of happiness an evolutionary advantage? Then it happened: a clash of opinions, inspections on definitions from each other, conversation like never before. And when the clock forcefully brought us the farewells of the day, they thought of making their discussion more concrete: a web log.
The Questioners' Queue, then, is a platform for us to ask questions of all variety, from different perspective, to all that may read and respond. Yet it is also a platform to record our discussion, our attempts to answer these questions.Last year, I encountered an internet comic pointing out that questions are much more important than answers, for quite a list of reasons. Personally, I believe that questions and their answers have a more dynamic relations: an answered questions may or may not lead to another question, while an unanswered ones are leading us to questions regarding the foundation of our understanding. One cannot evolve without another, and hence it is important to keep eyes on both new questions and creative answers. However, as questions may be asked faster than it can be pondered over and answered satisfyingly, the evolution of questions and answer is not at an equilibrium, and questioners need to line up and wait for their answers.
Therefore, be prepared for discussions that attempts to transcend many ideas with questions all over the topic, which may and may not have an attempt at an answer. As readers, it is also possible to have your own questions answered, just by contacting one of the authors. Lastly, know that our discussion may not be interesting to everyone, but should it be?