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+--- Thread: Asking the Right Questions (/thread-13966.html)
Asking the Right Questions - Yazata - Apr 14, 2023
Elon explains his philosophy and what motivates him. (He's worth $184 billion and still works 12 hour days, 7 days a week. Why?)
He says that he had an existential crisis as a youth and set out seeking the meaning of existence. He read all the religious texts he could get his hands on but didn't find any of them convincing. He tried philosophers and warns teenagers to be careful reading German philosophers (who won't do anything to help a kid's depression).
Then he read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy which he describes as an existential philosophy book disguised as humor, disguised as science fiction. (He's probably right.)
In that book, the Earth turns out to be a giant computer trying to solve "the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything". After many years of calculating, the super planet-sized computer announces the answer is '42'.
And Elon had kind of an epiphany. As he sees it, the universe is the Answer. It just is, it's what's real, it exists. The problem that all intelligent life faces, the really really hard problem, is to discover the right questions to ask, the questions that the universe is indeed the answer to. So the issue isn't so much finding the answer (it's right here, there, and everywhere), as it is formulating the questions that the answer is the answer to.
I assume that's why he studied physics. I don't think that it satisfied him either. But he'd found his meaning, his purpose, as a seeker. I don't think that Elon thinks that he will ever discover the right questions to ask, the questions that the universe is the answer to, but he thinks that humanity (the only intelligence that we currently know of in the universe) might have the potential to someday do exactly that.
So Elon's big purpose now is to ensure the survival of the human race (his environmental sustainability interests [Tesla]), to ensure that humanity retains the intellectual liberty to freely pose questions [Twitter] and to help give humanity the broader perspective that expanding out into the universe (interplanetary and eventually interstellar) might help provide [SpaceX]. And perhaps even to fuse the best features of human cognition with the incredible memory, sorting and searching abilities of computers [neuralink].
https://twitter.com/teslaownersSV/status/1646714114323152896
I like this, because it's very congruent with my own sense that we are surrounded by mysteries at every moment. When we examine any belief in detail, we will find that we can't justify it or explain it. (I'm not a foundationalist, we just sort of float...suspended by faith) The goal of philosophers here in our finite lives seems to be to expand the intellectual vocabulary so to speak, to broaden the stock of concepts that we can bring to bear on reality. Improving how we conceptualize things isn't so different from figuring out what questions to ask about them, I guess. Two sides of the same coin.
RE: Asking the Right Questions - Magical Realist - Apr 14, 2023
(Apr 14, 2023 07:39 PM)Yazata Wrote: And Elon had kind of an epiphany. As he sees it, the universe is the Answer. It just is, it's what's real, it exists. The problem that all intelligent life faces, the really really hard problem, is to discover the right questions to ask, the questions that the universe is indeed the answer to. So the issue isn't so much finding the answer (it's right here, there, and everywhere), as it is formulating the questions that the answer is the answer to.
I live my life as agnostically open as possible---as a questioning of all we think we know and a pondering of all that is. If the universe and Being is the final answer, how do we live our lives such that we experience this answer as intelligible and sufficient? The question presupposed by "it is" is simply "what is?". The journey is one of revealing all the manifold expressions of Being as part of a coalescing whole and as the ultimate point of the journey We are quite literally gawking tourists in this vast spectacle of existence. We viscerally share in this mystery of dumb and mute realness, and finding ourselves at home and at ease and safe in this infinitely ongoing mystery is ultimately the meaning of life.
RE: Asking the Right Questions - Kornee - Apr 15, 2023
Elon read all the religious texts he could find and found them all wanting. I can wholeheartedly agree with that. Not the seemingly implied 'sentient cosmos' though.
But what game is he playing actually:
https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/251702/elon-musk-posts-photo-with-pope-francis-at-the-vatican
Perhaps discussing specifics of upgrading the popemobile to an environmentally progressive Tesla custom EV? Or he is now actually one of the flock? Evidently not:
https://www.sportskeeda.com/pop-culture/what-is-the-religion-of-elon-musk