To be or not to be, THAT is the question.
I agree with this guy
No. He just restated the question with some vague linguistic baggage attached, what’s so special about that?
A little too complicated for you Zeusy?
No, what you’ve asked is “what question will yeild the most significant answer”. All you’ve done is restated the question replacing “important” with “significant”, as though that makes it somehow deeper and more philosophical. You don’t define significant, so for all I know the two words might mean exactly the same thing.
You think you’ve clarified the question by stating that it’s the answer rather than the question that’s important, when the real ambiguity in the original question that you should have addressed was in the definition of important.
In other words, your answer isn’t an answer, and it’s not a very good question either.
Can something really be a question, though, it is not asked as a question? What I’m getting at there is whether there might be something in the way that philosophy questions which is unique. Of course, none of this changes the fact that you are absolutely right that the (admittedly implicit) question of survival/subsistence is fundamental to our entire social structure. However, it seems to me that the fact that this question does not, properly speaking, become explicit until the modern age - with the decline of religion and the growth of the practical and social sciences, I would suggest - might give us cause to reconsider its status as fundamental as a question.
Seems obvious to me that it is too complicated for you Zeusy… way too complicated. But I like to give the mentally handicapped a chance. I’ll give you another chance to read it over and see that it says something significantly different from the OP.
I’m getting a sense that this point of contention is a free will vs. determinism argument (correct me if I’m wrong). I too have emboldened the part of the above statement with which I disagree. Here’s how I interpret you: you’re saying that since existence isn’t necessarily committed by us autonomously, it doesn’t count as an act, or at least an act derived from us. Thus, if that is what you’re saying, I would simply contend that you could make a similar argument for every action we commit, i.e., determinism. In truth, we don’t actually ‘control’ our thoughts in the strictest sense, and various endogenous and exogenous forces are at fault for most of our actions (though, since we can’t possibly hold them accountable, we resort to placing blame on the closest force of autonomy: the individual from whence the action came).
Moreover, when I say that we seek answers to justify our actions and lives, I don’t just mean the activities we partake in, but also the vicissitudes, whether natural or societal, that are inflicted upon us as well. That is to say, justifying our existences (which, according to you, are acts committed by the Universe), but also the existences of extraneous forces of nature and autonomous creatures that withhold the potentiality of inflicting pain (or pleasure) upon us. In a purely Schopenhauerian perspective (to which I from time to time avow), all of existence is will and will is the grand gesture of the Universe. Everything that exists wills; me, you, my T.V., the pink elephant in your attic. We, ultimately seek to justify this gesture. From what agency this action is derived–whether from us (free will), from the Universe itself (determinism), or from some grand creator (theism)–is irrelevant insofar that it still justifies itself.
Quite simply, what I’m trying to say is that all questions are, at least to some degree, put forth with ulterior motives of relevancy. That is, all questions are asked in the hopes that the respective answers will dictate some method of conduct in the inquirer–whether for future reference, or for immediate circumstances. Granted a better understanding of the world does seem to tickle our sensibilities, but I propose that the only reason why is that a better understanding of things lends a greater potentiality to successful courses of action. Thus, having a method or criterion by which to value human life seems Man’s most pressing question as it would determine a great deal of our behavior. All behavior, after all, is learned; the sources from which we learn behavior have, through time, become greatly discredited so that we are simply searching for new credible models; ‘-isms’, as you said.
Also, I by no means said that existential comprehension was philosophy’s only goal; I merely said that as of late (roughly the last two centuries), it has grown to one of its focal points, and, in my opinion, the most relevant to everyday, non-philosophizing people.
I find this extremely intriguing. I was recently reading Industrial Society and Its Future (yes, the one by Ted Kaczynski; it actually has some firm premises, though, bad conclusions). In it, Kaczynski categorizes what he calls the “power process” (which is just a fancy way of saying the will-to-power) into three main areas of expression: goals which are attained easily, goals which are attained through variable amounts of exertion, and goals which are beyond our capacity of achievement.
He goes on to posit how changes in society and civilization have reallocated drives within these categories. For him, modern, industrial society has created a void within the second category, which, he says, is where we receive most of our feelings of fulfillment. Because of the sustenance and basic accommodations provided by “the system”, like food, hydration, shelter, and so forth, many drives have been lumped into the first category. Because of the expansiveness of “the system” and its economic interests, individuals become increasingly isolated from whatever means they may need to attain certain aspirations, lumping crushed dreams and befallen hopes into the third category. In that context, Kaczynski sees all of humanity as collectively yearning to regress back into the primordial hunt and achieve the ecstatic high one gets from killing one’s own food. Damn luddites!
Anyways, I went on a tangent; I just wanted to muse on, well, your musings.
You are 
(see below)
For me, it has nothing to do with free will or determinism. Even within determinism, you have compatibilism, which says that an act can be considered ‘willed’ if it follows from a desire or intention to see the act realized, so I don’t think we can rule out willed action so easily. For me, the issue has more to do with our existence, or the existence of anything, being a done deal so to speak. It’s not something you can catch yourself in the act of doing. You find yourself in existence, and how you got here is something you might ponder or speculate over, but it’s rarely ever something we feel responsible for (even if we do believe in the freedom of our will).
So then is your use of the word ‘justification’ more than a sort of moral or reason-based basis for human action? What I mean is, if we seek to ‘justify’ our actions, and if we consider our existence an ‘act’, then one might take this to mean we feel responsible for existing and we seek to find the right ‘excuse’, or some rational behind that act such we don’t seem driven by blind irrationality. But there are other uses of the word ‘justification’ such as a mathematical justification or a legal one or an economic one or a scientific one. When you say that we try to justify our existence, if you mean this in the sense that we try to find an explanation or a purpose for it, then I’d be more inclined to agree with you (but we’ll see where this goes before I commit to anything ).
I think I more or less agree with this; it sounds relatively similar to what I said earlier - about our drive to inquire about the world serving to create mental models that are useful for making predictions and the control of life easier. But then you said “Thus, having a method or criterion by which to value human life seems Man’s most pressing question as it would determine a great deal of our behavior” which sounds a little vague. What do you mean by having a method/criterion for valuing life?
Oh, well, that changes the context completely. Yes, the question of existence (ours or otherwise) and how to justify it is certain a “hot topic” in philosophy - it has been ever since it was OK to ask the question (roughly 200 years as you said). I would agree with you that the question of existence may be one of the driving forces behind philosophical inquiry of all kinds. But we should still draw the distinction between a philosophical question being relevant (to life, to fulfillment, etc.) and the reasons why we ask them (which is a biological predisposition IMO).
I do see what you mean. But I did state earlier that we also try to justify or “explain way” acts committed upon or against us as well. Obviously we aren’t responsible for diseases we are afflicted with or socio-economic conditions were are born into, yet we still try to justify them. Why? Because for us to know the ‘intentions’ of extraneous forces (and, thus, further completing our scientific mental models of the world), we can more easily determine our own intentions and behaviors as a reciprocation of this. In the most overarching sense, we aren’t just trying to justify our existences; instead we are trying to justify all of existence.
I think that every question ultimately leads to an innate urge to reassure oneself that one’s own lifetime and the experiences within it aren’t empty. Thus, when I say human life, I don’t mean human livelihood. I don’t mean that people are simply satisfied with justifying their births, because usually aren’t; rather, some constant, omnipresent, redeeming quality must permeate every waking second of our lives. Otherwise we feel them to have been wasted and unfulfilled.
So what I mean when I say that human life and its value is our most eminent point of inquiry, I mean that whenever we valuate any external object, we are also connecting it to us in terms of relevancy and contrast in hopes that it well help define us. We want to valuate ourselves and our lives and our time and we are constantly doing this in the only way we know how; by valuating and modeling our surroundings. We hope that our environment is in fact a mirror that will adequately reflect our true selves; that it will show us some sort of empty slot wherein we were meant to fit.
What am I to believe?
What is with everyone calling me mentally handicapped all of a sudden? First Satyr, then Echo, then you. I don’t get it, have I actually become stupider in the two years I’ve been here? Nobody called me dumb when I first signed up, and I was considerably younger then.
Your response to the OP is meaningless.
I’ll accept that we can’t know for sure whether an answer is significant or not until we know what it is, until we’ve found it. Now, either you believe that the significance of an answer can be indicated by the significance of its question, or you do not. In both cases, your question is self-defeating.
In the first case, your question argues for it’s own death. We can reasonably say that significant questions will on the whole yield significant answers more often than insignificant questions, and looking for significant questions and solving them will find significant answers more often than choosing and solving questions at random. Therefore, the question which will yield the most significant answers, when the questions it yields as answers are solved, is “What are the most important questions?”, which is the OP’s statement. That is, the answer to the question “which question will yield the most significant answers?”, when applied to the comparison of “which questions will yield the most significant answers?” (you) and “which questions are most significant?” (OP), is “which questions are most significant?”(OP), because this question leads us to solve questions with higher probabilities of significant answers first, resulting in more significant answers. The question you proposed replace the OP’s question actually argues for us accepting the OP’s question over yours. As asking it leads to us asking the OP’s question, yours is an unnecessary restatement.
If you believe that the apparent significance of a question has no bearing on the significance of that question’s answer, then there will be no difference in the number of significant answers found by the answering the questions produced by “What are the most important questions?” and “What questions will yield the most significant answers”, so in terms of significant answers produced, your question is equivalent to the OP and there is no reason why we should accept the one over the other.
Two strategies are possible, solving significant questions, or solving questions that will yield significant answers.
Let’s say we choose to solve questions that will yield significant answers:
If significant questions result in significant answers more often than insignificant questions, then to solve questions that will yield significant answers the best strategy is to solve significant questions. Therefore, solving questions that will yield significant answers, in this case, is equivalent to solving significant questions.
If significant questions result in the same number of significant answers as solving insignificant questions, then they are equivalent.
God damn. Look what we’ve done. Round and round in circles I’m going, god damn, somebody stop the logic please, I want to get off. I’m coming back to this in the morning. It should be so bloody simple but every time I get so bloody close and then I lose track of where I am. Damn. No more philosophy at midnight. Bad for my brains. I just can’t construct a deduction correctly at this hour.
Oh wait, I see the problem.
Ok there’s a third possibility, that the significance of the answer to a question is indicated by some aspect (property X) of the question that is not its apparent significance. There are still problems in this case. First of all, why not just call this property X “significance”? Secondly, though the OP’s question doesn’t let us find any more significant answers in this situation than solving random questions, your question does not tell us what this significance-indicating property X of questions is, so it doesn’t lead to us solving questions with significant answers indicated by property X. The most it could do is tell us that if we ever find a property X type thing we should look for aand answer questions that have it. So, your question and the OP’s are again equivalent in terms of significant answers found.
Your question is an unnecessary restatement of the OP.
In my opinion “why” will come top of the list, closely contested with “how”.
Hmmm, let’s figure that one out.
What question??? I think I see where you’re confused.
You’re trying way too hard, zeusy.
Well, at least you’ve got your sense of humor about you.
Well, you’ve almost got it with this one. You’re whole problem spins around the assumption that I’m posing a question in my post. Although it may seem like it prima facia - what with the “So the question is, what question will yeild the most significant answer” - the larger point I was trying to make is that such a question is unanswerable unless you already know the answer to it (but then why ask the question).
So you can go ahead and say I was merely rephrasing the OP’s question, but to confuse this as my answer to his question is confusion through-and-through. I was trying to show, through a rephrasing of the question, that it can’t be answered in any meaningful way. That’s a point that was certainly not presupposed in the OP.
I bet you’d do anything to prove this.
I don’t know what the question is, but whatever it is the answer is 42
The cosmos is the question of questions, and the answer is not other than the question.
TO thezeus18:
While it took you an extremely longwinded amount of arguing to prove your point, I agree; he (gib) was rephrasing my question. However, I think he was well aware of that.
TO gib:
Yeah, I never intended for my original question to yield any “significant” answer(s) (just significant questions?); in fact, I think if you sign up to this forum and expect any significant answers, you’re in for a rude awakening. All I’m trying to do is open up some debate and discussion, as you and zeus are doing. Either way, I totally accept your original response–the disputed “rephrasing”–as a completely valid musing. I think we all need to differentiate between passive musing and outright philosophical proclamations.
That’s interesting. Is that to say that all ‘answers’, like the one you’ve just put forth, are negations of the cosmos? After all, answers negate questions. Questions, thus, debase commonly accepted foundations of truth. If questions are inherently iconoclastic and polemic towards truth–if you accept the definition of ‘truth’ as being consensually held beliefs–, is that then to say that the cosmos in themselves, by virtue of their very existences, are assailants of truth?
What do you think the significance of the “why” and “how” questions, if they were answered, would bring? And what makes “why” more important than “how”?