Where do Questions Come From?

Why do we ask questions? It is in our nature to ask questions, and it is very evident from early childhood till old age. We never stop asking questions, and we start the very second we cam, often with a simple why. Is it answers we seek, yes of course it is, what else could it be? Life is a search for knowledge and it is different for all of us. Some ask questions that haven’t been asked before, some ask questions in specific topics, some just want to know everything, I fall into this last category.

Our desire to learn is one of our fundamental strengths. No matter our situation, we are always asking new questions or finding better answers to old questions. Without this desire the human race would be much worse off, and it should not be taken for granted that we are such in inquisitive race. Imagine we never bothered asking why people get sick, we may have stumbled across penicillin anyway, but would we have cared? We’d still be living in the dark ages if it weren’t for our reliable desire to expand our knowledge, and that’s what a question is, a method to expanding ourselves.

It may be hard to envision an intelligent race that would not question the world around them, but it doesn’t seem that unlikely to me. We could have easily made life simple and begun to coast. Why bother striving for better, or more, when what you have right now is pretty good? Does the fact that we continue on, make us selfish? We don’t answer questions, or ask them for that matter, for selfish reasons, yes there is often a net gain once we’ve answered a new question but that’s not our goal. If it was we wouldn’t ask questions about Mars, or various stars, or anything else that won’t immediately help us.

The greatest minds of the entire human race are known for their minds because they asked questions others would not ask. Da Vinci asked why humans could not fly, he might not have been as successful as he would have liked, but human do tend to fly quite a bit nowadays. Newton asked why an apple would have the inclination to attack him. Einstein asked the toughest question we’ve ever answered, what is light. These are not questions that needed to be answers, the desire to know the answers came from somewhere else. But where?

Evolution is generally accepted as something that occurs to our physical nature. It includes expansions to our minds, the ability to reason for instance (although that particular answer is argued quite a bit). The questions we ask may or may not be considered a part of evolution, it depends how much of our existence is natural and how much is synthetic. Is everything nature, do the decisions we make, the questions we ask, are they all just part of who we are, or do we expand ourselves without help from mother nature?

Is asking a question as much a part of us as carrying a piece of food back to the hill a part of being an ant? Or does the question asking come from a different part of us, a part that’s beyond the natural world? Most of us assume the latter, otherwise we’d consider cars and industry a part of the natural world. Something seperates us and our drive to learn more about the world around us is on the side we consider our own. So if asking questions are not just an evolutionary quirk to our human nature, where else could is come from? I wish I knew.

I may not have all the answers, yet, but one thing I know for sure, I won’t stop till I get all the answers or I die. If I ever do get all the answers the first thing I’m going to do is start looking for more questions.