Big questions
Intro
To be human is to ask questions, often about processes that we can only partly understand.
The following are our Top Ten set of "Big Questions" that modern people commonly ask ourselves when we consider our environment and our personal and collective long-term future. One measure of human progress is to get us all to a place where we can ask and debate scientific and philosophical questions like these. With the exception of Question 10, these are questions whose answers we do not depend upon for survival, but instead for thriving, for greater personal and collective insight, success and happiness.
Our world views are perhaps the greatest influence on our answers to these questions. We sometimes answer them more philosophically, with beliefs, logic, arguments, and intuitions, and sometimes more scientifically, with evidence, theory, hypotheses, and experiments. While all our answers are provisional, they help us to discover and reduce important uncertainties.
Knowing your own and others current answers to these questions can help you improve your big picture foresight, and your ability to work with others who have different answers than your own. Our provisional answers to these questions will largely determine whether we have a net positive, net negative, or uncertain vision of the future. Lack of answers means we have no vision. Positive, Negative, Uncertain, and Absent are the four main normative (values-based) vision states. One goal of this wiki is to use evo-devo thinking to help more people get to practical, actionable positive visions, from the personal to the universal.
Which of these questions or our provisional answers were new to you? Which were most helpful? With which do you disagree? How might we resolve our disagreements over these big questions in the future, to arrive at better shared answers?
Index
- What Existed Before Our Universe? Is reality Autopoietic (self-maintaining, self-replicating, and creative), like life? Is there a Multiverse?
- What Kind of Universe Do We Appear to Live In? Is it Accidental? God-Created? Autopoietic (Evo-Devo)? Are cosmological learning and cosmological natural selection our best current answers to the fine-tuning problem in physics?
- What is Accelerating Change, and what Stabilizes It? What explains the accelerating universal complexification we see in Sagan's Cosmic Calendar? What physics and informatics drives it? What stabilizes and protects it, and how can we better protect and guide accelerating human culture and technology, including AI?
- What is Life? Evo and Devo. What aspects will be Unique (Evo) and what aspects Universal (Devo) on all Earthlike Planets? Can complex life even emerge on non-Earthlikes?
- What is Mind? Evo and Devo. Partially Stochastic, Partially Deterministic. What does science tell us of free will? Of computational incompleteness?
- What are Human Beings? What describes The Gap between human and non-human animal minds? We are a blend of Head, Hand, Heart. We possess unique linguistic and mental capacities, tool use, and deep prosociality and goal-directedness. What else?
- Where is Intelligent Life Going in our Universe? Hierarchical substrates. Increased Network Complexity, Resilience, and Adaptiveness. Do AIs have emerging goals and minds? Are they becoming increasingly like us? How do we ensure symbiosis with them? What are the most likely class of solutions to the Fermi Paradox?
- What are Our Highest (Universal) Purposes? Create, Discover, Adapt. Steer toward Preferable. Avoid the Preventable. Create, Discover, Test and Defend Adaptive Goals and Visions.
- What are Our Greatest Opportunities, as a Species? Promoting Network Adaptiveness. Bottom Up Empowerment. Personal AIs. Reducing the Informational Destructiveness of Death.
- What are Our Current Greatest Challenges? (aka What Dehumanizes Us Most and What Might Destroy Us?) Ignorance, Lack of Empathy, Poverty, War, Pandemic, Nuclear Proliferation, Crime, Human Rights Abuses, Climate Change, Plutocracy, Underregulated Capitalism...
Next Steps
Scholars, let's create Big Questions pages for each of these, one at a time. Format should include Related Subquestions, Leading Thinkers, Argument Map Answers, and Foresight and Action Implications sections for both the most common and the most evidence-based answers.
