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The hidden power of unanswerable questions

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The hidden power of unanswerable questions

“It’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong.”

Big Think,

5 min read
3 take-aways
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Don’t answer questions — fall in love with them.

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Are you old enough to remember a time when people could ask questions — profound or trivial — and engage in lively debate without turning to the omniscient internet for a definitive answer? Nowadays, ChatGPT processes more than one billion questions every day, and Google churns out some five trillion search results annually. The dawn of the internet age has turned questions into “little more than automatic triggers for retrieving information.” Philosopher Shai Tubali explores the essence of a question and avers that its virtue isn’t in the answer it provides but in the insightful thinking it provokes.

Summary

Questions are more important than answers.

What is a question? Philosopher Lani Watson argues that questions are tools that help people to communicate, make decisions, explore, discuss, express emotions, discover information, and so on. In other words, Watson regards questions as “information-seeking acts” and “mere servants of their answers.” However, not all questions have answers. As scholar Felix S. Cohen outlined, a question’s purpose isn’t merely to find an answer. Questions exist independently, unshackled from answers. Therefore, questions are more important than answers.

Nevertheless, questions are an under-researched element of philosophy that is worthy of further examination. For instance, can a question be right or wrong? What is the value of a question with no answer? Is an unanswerable question still worth asking?

Questions are “sparks...

About the Author

Author, philosopher, and researcher Shai Tubali studies existentialism, Indian philosophy, and the ethical implications of artificial intelligence.

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