You have been collecting questions, most of them fairly simple and direct ones, of the form, "What does this do?" or "How do I do that?" You have also gotten some experience with how to write questions, and how to ask them.
But we will meet deeper questions, and I want to give you a heads up. No, I'm not going to tell you, I'm going to prod you to discover most of them. But there are some things I don't know how to get you to discover on your own. Just consider this whole chapter as part of The Undiscoverable. Make notes and write down your own questions as usual.
You have questions whenever you see or otherwise encounter something of any importance or interest that you don't know about. When you meet people, too. You have questions when you want to know whether someone else shares something significant in your life. It could be a sport, a hobby, a job, an illness, a language, or, as I say, anything of significance to you.
Much of the time, the obvious response to a question is to give an answer or to say, "I don't know," or "You could look it up." Sometimes the appropriate response is to say, "Good question," and then think about it. The best questions give you something to think about for the rest of your life. What makes a question good depends on what you think your purpose is. Do you know what your purpose is in life? Whether you think you do or whether you think you don't, that is the best question of all.
In science, a good question is one where we know that there is something we don't understand, but we have an idea how to find out. The best questions are not simply, "That's odd. I wonder what causes that," or "I wonder how that works," although questions of that kind are often excellent. The best questions require us to admit that our previous understanding was faulty, and to come up with a better idea. Not that we were completely wrong before, but that our ideas were only approximate, or applied to some situations but not others.
So Copernicus corrected Ptolemy, and Galileo and Kepler corrected Copernicus, and Isaac Newton corrected and extended them all, and Einstein corrected and greatly extended Newton. So Darwin rebuilt biology from the ground up, and so did the geneticists and the molecular biologists. How did Einstein do it? Well, he was a genius in various ways. That helped. But he also asked questions that nobody else asked. What would it look like if you could ride along with a beam of light? What if space and time are not separate?
The best questions in mathematics are, "That's impossible. Isn't it?" Zero was considered impossible, even blasphemous in Europe, when it was brought over from Arab mathematicians into Crusader Christendom. Subtracting a larger number from a smaller one was once obviously impossible, but then mathematicians invented negative numbers. Since then they have invented an amazing variety of other kinds of numbers. Have you heard of modular arithmetic? Imaginary numbers? Complex numbers? Elliptic curve arithmetic? Infinite, or more precisely transfinite numbers? How about non-standard numbers, or hyperreal numbers? Notice that several of of those names mean "impossible numbers that we have been forced to accept in order to solve various problems". For two millennia, Euclidean geometry was the only possibility. Then non-Euclidean geometry proved to be not only possible, but necessary for physics. A century ago, mathematical logic and set theory were in crisis, as every system that mathematicians tried to create as a basis for the rest of mathematics turned out to be inconsistent. It took decades to come up with usable, but deeply unsatisfactory, solutions.
Don't worry if you don't know what I was talking about there. You aren't supposed to know all that. Most mathematicians don't know all of it. It's good to contemplate problems that are not only unsolved, but currently incomprehensible, whether to you or to everyone. Niels Bohr said, "If you think you understand Quantum Mechanics, that is evidence that you don't."
There are questions in every field of human endeavor or leisure. Many questions are ordinary, in that somebody knows the answer, and you can find out what it is. Some questions are more interesting. An interesting question is one where we don't know the answer yet, or we don't agree on the answer, but each have our own ideas on it, and when we get the answer we can do things that we can't do now. "How do we end poverty?" is one of the best questions I know of, and look! Here we are doing something about it.
Much of conventional education has been bogged down in the idea of the "right answer" in the teacher's manual that accompanies a textbook. This is a severely limiting idea, appropriate only if you think that the purpose of schooling is to create good little cogs in a machine designed by their betters, so that you have all of the questions and answers that matter. As opposed to informed citizens, able to take part effectively in civic society, particularly in discussions of questions that don't have agreed-on answers.
Politics and religion are the two areas where it is most obvious that we don't have the answers, in spite of all of the ideologies and churches that claim otherwise. Throughout history, we can see that they didn't even have the right questions. It is appropriate, therefore, to suppose that we, too, have not yet asked the most relevant questions, and to think about training up a generation of children to start asking them.
I say training, but how do you train someone to do what you don't know how to do? High level science and math education gives us a clue. You make sure that students admitted at that level know enough of what is known to be able to do the work, and then you require them to find an unsolved problem that they can solve. High level music is a bit different. Students have to have skill, not just knowledge. They still have to create something new, whether a new composition or a new interpretation of existing music.
You can't fake skill in math, science, or music. The opposite end of the spectrum includes politics, religion, and philosophy, areas where by definition we are dealing with unsolved problems (again, no matter what the claims of bogus practitioners, whether Marxist-Leninists or the Christian Right in the US).
When an issue in politics gets a definitive answer, it ceases to be a matter for politicians. Political "experts" and ordinary citizens must equally grapple with the issues that divide the community, where we have not yet found a better rule than simple majorities, sometimes of the people, sometimes of their representatives or of panels of judges, tempered by Constitutional protections. Even then, some people have to be authorized to make certain kinds of decision themselves, particularly a President or Prime Minister, or a military officer.
When an area of philosophy gets a definitive answer, that area becomes a science or a branch of mathematics. This is what happened to Natural Philosophy in Isaac Newton's hands. Immanuel Kant thought that he had a philosophical proof that Euclidean geometry is necessarily true. He published it shortly before mathematicians such as Gauss took up non-Euclidean geometry seriously, publishing a few decades later. So Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is not a branch of mathematics, while curved space and spacetime are. Paradoxes in logic and set theory gave philosophers scope to consider Foundations of Mathematics as removed from established mathematics. Those who consider the problem solved by technical advances in mathematics consider this phase to be over, and those who object to the technical solutions continue to treat it as philosophy.
A number of religions have put forward the idea that religion is between individuals and the divine, and nobody can tell you what to believe, or how to act on your beliefs.
Martin Luther: Religion is not 'doctrinal knowledge,' but wisdom born of personal experience.
What can only be taught by the rod and with blows will not lead to much good; they will not remain pious any longer than the rod is behind them.Shakyamuni Buddha: Do not go by reports (repeated hearing), by legends, by traditions, by rumours, by scriptures, by surmise, conjecture and axioms, by inference and analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by specious reasoning or bias toward a notion because it has been pondered over, by another's seeming ability, or by the thought, 'This monk (contemplative) is our teacher."
However, Kalamas, when you yourselves know: "Such and such things are unskilful (bad); blameworthy; criticized by the wise; and if adopted and carried out lead to harm and ill and suffering," you need to abandon them.
On the other hand, when you know for yourselves that, "These and these things are skillful; blameless; even praised by the wise; and lead to welfare and happiness when taken up and carried out, then you should enter and remain in them.Etha tumhe Kalama. Ma anussavena, ma paramparaya, ma itikiraya, ma pitasampadanena, ma takkahetu, ma nayahetu, ma akaraparivitakkena, nid ditthinijjhanakkhantiya, ma bhabbarupataya, ma samanro no garu ti.
King Kharvela (born in the family of Rajarshi Vasu) declares himself in his inscription (approximately 2nd century BCE):
Translation: I am worshipper of all sects, restorer of all shrines.
Mohammed, as relayed from Allah through an angel: There is no compulsion in matters of religion.
Laozi: It produces and nourishes; it produces them and does not claim them as its own; it does all, and yet does not boast of it; it presides over all, and yet does not control them.
Others, of course, claim to have the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Sometimes it seems that their teaching is, "When I want to hear your opinion, I'll tell it to you."
Here, to get you started, is a short list of questions that inherently do not have right answers. How do you think we should approach them with children?
The two-dollar words for these and related questions are "ontology" for what exists; "epistemology" for how we know anything; "ethics" for what to do and why.
You will see that we can raise these questions with quite young children as long as we leave the two-dollar words and arcane theories out of it. In fact, every step in your exploration raises these questions, if you pay attention. For example, the trackpad on the XO is in three sections, two of which have never been activated. So in fact, we have a real trackpad, and two areas that look like trackpads but aren't. In terms of the questions above, they aren't real, don't believe them, and don't worry about it, unless you are an expert in programming device drivers, and have nothing better to do. No, you aren't and you don't? I didn't think so. Yes, you are and you do? Brilliant. You won't have any trouble finding the people to work with, and getting at what information and code they have brought together so far.
Consider this idea, from Computer Scientist Edsger Dijkstra
Only do what only you can do.
That obviously includes eating, sleeping, and so on. It also means that you will educate children, whether you intend to or not, whether you are around them or not. Children absorb everything, including neglect and indifference. Only you can consider them your responsibility, and take the trouble to seek them out and listen to them yourself.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled program of explorations.
There has been error in communication with booki server. Not sure right now where is the problem.
You should refresh this page.