Question: How can I expand my knowledge about anything?
Answer: You can systematically expand your knowledge about anything by finding answers to the following questions about it.
1. What are its parts?
2. Who/what has the equivalents of those which it has?
3. Who/what is connected by it?
4. Who/what can affect it?
5. What are its forms?
6. Who/what can substitute it?
7. Who/what will be satisfied by it?
Do you disagree with this? If you disagree, what is your answer to this question?
The only relevant question to answer is; What affect does it have on the universe?
The standard questions come to mind; Who/What, How (cusWhy), When, Where, forWhy, and How much?
The answers would involve type of affect, strength, speed, distance, and means issues.
Which type of affect does it have on which things?
How strong is its affect on which things?
How quickly does it affect which things?
How close to which things does it have to be?
By what means does it affect which things?
Of course each of those involve similar questions concerning everything else involved; the other “things”.
The standard questions, why, what, when, how, where, who does not take you to the internal details of a thing.
For example, I want to expand my knowledge on “Ilovephilosophy.com”
If I ask, why, what, when, how, where, who, it won’t take you to the internal details.
In order to expand knowledge about Ilovephilosophy, One has to explore and answer:
What are its parts?
Who/what has the equivalents of those which it has?
But are you wanting to know about “it” or about what is inside of “it”, its make?
I think it is more important to fully understand what something is before worrying about what might be inside it. I would think the “How” question (“by what means”) would answer that, else you presume empirical existence and priori definitions of particulates that might not be real and/or are misleading. Science tends to inject its presumptions of empirical definitions upon everything and ends up with paradoxes and presumptions of both existences that are superstitious in nature as well as non-existences that are merely formed of a different type of understanding.
But if it seems important to you, presume prior knowledge of particulates and merely add;
6)Of what is its make? or
6) Which things make it up?
The objective is the primary. What do you want to know about it? It is the primary question. How would you know that you want to know about it is secondary.
I think my point was that “What is it?” is primary.
And what something is, is not formulated by of what it is made, but rather by what affect it has; its “properties”.
Things are often more than the sum of their parts.
These questions refer to the properties of things!!
What are its parts? - divisibility
Who/what has the equivalents of those which it has? - comparability
Who/what is connected by it? - connectivity
Who/what can affect it? - sensitivity
What are its forms? - transformability
Who/what can substitute it? - susbstitutability
Who/what will be satisfied by it? - satisfiability
• Divisibility lets you know the parts of that which is under study. Anything which has no divisibility will never let you to know what is in it. What is that which has nothing in it? What will you do if nothing has divisibility? What would your knowledge be if nothing has divisibility?
• Comparability lets you know the abundance of that which is under study. Do you have that which I have? How many of them have that? How many times it is? How frequent it is? How often it is? No quantification can be done without a unit of comparison. The multiplicity, numerosity, relative distribution or the relative abundance of a thing cannot be re-cognized in the absence of comparability.
• Connectivity lets you know those which are connected to that which is under study. Anything which has no connections has no bounds.
• Sensitivity lets you know those which can affect that which is under study. Sensitivity allows you to know the cause of an effect and the effect of a cause. No cause can have an effect on that which has no sensitivity.
• Transformability lets you know the forms of that which is under study. You can never transform that which can exist only in one form.
• Substitutability lets you know ‘what can’ instead of ‘that which is under study’.
• Satisfiability lets you to know the conditions that can be satisfied by that which is under study.
Do get answers you must ask questions. Understand everything, would first require questioning everything. But then I don’t know that you get to the answer but rather just approach it.