h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

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Why do we question everything? And then question the answers we're given?

Not everyone does!

I think humans have an inbuilt curiosity, but it can be supressed or encouraged by nurture.

If humans, as a species, didn't have this inbuilt curiousity we would not have ..evolved..? to our current scientific etc knowledge.

We have evolved as a species beset with questions.

The ability to investigate is a useful tool for survival. The more you know about your surroundings, the better equipped you are to survive them.

If you are a member of a team, and other members of that team are capable of having different or better knowledge of their surroundings than you do, then it is useful to have a method by which you can access that information.

The team's survival prospects also benefit from sharing the information aquired by its individual members.

The question is a good way for one human individual to assess their surroundings. It also allows one to gain access to the human information pool.

Questioning the answer given may help to improve its utility - as is very likely to be the case with this one.

Assuming we aren't just questioning as part of a wind-up, we generally ask questions when there is a discrepancy between our internal model of the world works, and how the world appears to work in practice.

The internal world model is what allows us to dream of, plan and anticipate the future, and is vital for those of us who want to work out what we could do in advance, rather than simply reacting reflexively to events in real time. Our ability to model the world in our heads is what Karl Popper said 'permits our hypotheses to die in our stead' - we don't need to do the act to work out what would happen if we mooned that tiger / jumped out of that tree, etc?

We have quite a special brain, and questions are one of the ways of loading that brain with useful information, assuming the person we ask has worthwhile knowledge and the desire to impart it.

I think we question out of natural curiousity (as already stated.) My three year old daughter is full of questions and has been since she could talk. But she trusts the answers I give her. But I think as we grow we learn that not all answers are black and white or complete or honest, and so we learn not to trust. And so we question our answers. I wonder why we have learned not to give honest answers? Fear? Selfishness? I wonder why I told her about santa claus last December. I almost told her it was pretend, but then I didn't want to spoil it for her. It still bothers me that I let her go on thinking is true.

I think I agree with Elrond, it is when out intuitive view of the world is out of step with how the world really is.

I am a naturally curious person, always have been, and always will be, for me it is fascination of nature in all its majesty...
there are others though, for whom the world holds no fascination or wonder, and IMO they might as well be dead!

Or at least stop bothering those of us who do find the world fascinating.

I would say the majority of people don't ask questions. Part of why the world looks the way it does. If we started questioning things, I think this world would change for the better.

But I think curiosity is a very basic instincts that most animals have. Knowledge is power, and curiosity is what gives you that knowledge. But it can be discouraged. There is a children's book that is famous in Denmark called "Spoerge-Joergen". It's about a kid that keeps asking questions about everything, and in the end is send to bed without pancakes because of it. I think the moral it's trying to teach children is, "Shut up with those questions and stop pestering us."

Dr. Deckchair Funderlik:
>>If you are a member of a team, and other members of that team are capable of having different or better knowledge of their surroundings than you do, then it is useful to have a method by which you can access that information.

The team's survival prospects also benefit from sharing the information aquired by its individual members.<<

Yeah, but what if those team members don't share anymore? Isn't that part of the problem we face now on earth? Specialization has gone so far that even if we would get the information we wouldn't understand it. Like when some physic would tell me about nuclear whatevers, I wouldn't get it - probably.

Xanatic:
>>I would say the majority of people don't ask questions. Part of why the world looks the way it does. If we started questioning things, I think this world would change for the better.<<

Couldn't agree more!

Methos

All living things are "curious". They explore their environments as a survival trait. BUT they explore the environment in ways that are relevant to the way they make their living out of it.

Humans are no different, but the human environment is very complicated, including as it does other complicated humans. We have too much to learn to do it without absorbing a lot of it second hand as it were. Among the things we learn are strategies for learning, and this is where nurture and experience come in. And some people are taught how to not learn, unfortunately.

Children can only be taught what they're ready to learn, so not telling them what they're not ready to understand is often a good thing.

Noggin

Couldn't agree more with those who don't find the world fascinating - or at least those who don't find life fascinating!

Oh, incidentally, I really don't get the whole Father Christmas gig (don't worry, I do understand that he's not real!) Why do we do that? I know St Nic, but how did that alter into the ritualistic lying to our kids?

Methos, I don't think that any of the communicative methods for obtaining information within our species are perfect or easy. Nor do I ever think they ever were that way. The possibility of duplicity puts paid to that.

But it is still better to have the facility to ask a question than not to. That is what confers the evolutionary advantage. "Natural curiosity" doesn't explain why we ask questions, it just claims that it is fundamental to our nature. I am trying to get at the underlying evolutionary benefits that would make question asking result as fundamental to our nature.

I don't think that we don't share anymore. We have systems of education and systems for the global dissemination of information. They are not easy, nor are they perfect, but they are there.

Elrond, I am not sure what is meant by :

<>

That makes it sound like we mostly ask questions only when something appears to be wrong with the world as we see it. I don't think that is the case.

If our inquiries into the state of the world were largely predicated on when we *think* something is wrong, I think our ability to survive would have been seriously compromised. Another species that questioned its environment continually, regardless of threat, would have been more likely to flourish and survive.

The modern Father Christmas was an advertising gimmick invented by a certain soft drinks company.

The evolutionary benefit of knowing your way around your environment seems obvious. If you don't know where food/potential mates and so on are to be found, and how to avoid being food for something else, you don't get the chance to evolve.

The discrepancy argument works quite well if you include a blank space in your model of the world to be at odds with what's actually there. Of course, you still have to scan the environment to spot the discrepancies, but it's the unexpected, not the expected, that grabs the attention.

Noggin

I can appreciate the benefit of curiosity in keeping ourselves alive & the species evolving, but we do also ask a lot of questions to which we don't need to know the answers.
Some of these are perhaps simply a way of interacting with other people - showing interest, merely keeping conversation flowing, some are a way of being in control of our lives.
Sometimes people prefer not to ask questions because they would rather trust others to be control.
Could these be regarded as beneficial?

I suppose it might work like this..

You don't need to know where to find food to evolve - but if you are in the game of actively seeking food, i.e. looking for it, then you will need some way to model the world in your mind.

You still don't need to ask questions though. You could get by without them, its just more likely you will meet misfortune than another species that is better able to inform itself.

A question is predicated on a doubt - or at least on the possibility of a doubt. So, to become a question asker, you need to realise this: That the world is sometimes not as you perceive it. After you've grasped that, you are ready to ask away.

You might now just ask them when things look odd - and that could get you out of trouble sometimes. But better is just to have the facility to ask them all the time.

One species doesn't go behind a rock only when it sees an odd shadow there - maybe a tiger. Another species always thinks .. "Hmmm maybe there's something behind that rock". The second one is better placed to survive the smarter tiger.

Dr Deckchair Funderlik,
I didn't mean to say that you were wrong. Of course, specialization and the ability to wonder about your surroundings were key factors in the human evolution.

I just meant to say that now where humankind at least thinks that we are no longer part of the natural progress of evolution, the mechanisms of it seem no longer to work.

Methos

I'd be happy if you said I was wrong! I don't claim any authority on this. I'm just trying to get somewhere with it - trying to gain some insight, into something - not sure what yet...

I'm still not sure if things are worse now, communication-wise, than before, though much has changed, of course.

In terms of evolution, I haven't the faintest idea where we are going now, which I suppose is about the best to hope for.

But, what springs to mind is Dawkin's idea of the Meme - which, I think, is an idea that behaves like a gene - it replicates itself succesfully by causing enivronmental changes - through us, and through our machines, i.e. computers and the Internet - which make conditions good for its further replication.

Basic point: Ideas are forming the world of their own future. How the questioning mechanism plugs into that ... I do not know.

could you explain that a little bit more? Do oyu mean that the idea itself becomes part of some kind of evolution?

Methos

Fascinating thread this (having just read bits of the one about how shallow we researchers are!!)

For me I think the interesting thing about our questioning nature is that the more we uncover about L,tU&E the more there is to find out.
We get down to new levels of detail (like new sub-atomic particles, or the causes of disease) and yet we still aren't (in my opinion) any closer to really knowing what's going on, and Nature keeps throwing up new conundrums! But we keep looking, and that's the great thing.