#BigQuestions
TEDxAmsterdam is introducing a new publication on Medium: Big Questions. In this publication, you’ll be able to read about the big questions our team has been thinking about, interviews with speakers and performers, and interact with our writing team. We hope that you will follow us and help us make our publication more engaging with your own comments and questions.
Big Questions…
We all have them, and we’ve been asking them for millennium. Aristotle and other philosophers of his time wondered which came first, the chicken or the egg. Over a hundred years before Aristotle, people were already debating the nature of free will. Every second, a child somewhere is asking why.
Big Questions is also the theme of TEDxAmsterdam 2015. As Monique van Dusseldorp, experience and programming team lead, says:
“Big Questions is really about the big problems of this age: the big questions we ask ourselves about our life, the biggest new decisions we need to take as society in the wake of huge technological advances, and the biggest questions asked in science.”
Who knows? Perhaps it is the very act of questioning that differentiates humans from other species.
Dr. Who?
We may not ever know what the first question asked was. Maybe it was why? Why does one plant make me feel sick while another one makes me feel good? Why did you do that? Why am I here?
Maybe it was what? What is that? What am I? What is the meaning of life? What is the oldest question?
Big Questions are needed at this time: a time that is as revolutionary as the one that accompanied the printing press. The questions we ask now will determine so much about our place in the world. Questions change the way that we see and understand the world around us. They lead to discovery and reflection.
With each technological and societal disruption, humanity becomes concerned with the problem of having more information than can be processed. There was a time when people feared that too many books would lead to an inability to think in a nuanced manner. Now we worry how constant access to information and screens will affect our cognitive abilities. How much more can we absorb? Now that’s a big question.
Ask and Answer
In the Big Question publication, TEDxAmsterdam’s team of crack bloggers will do what it can to ask and respond to big questions. We’ll share interviews with TEDxAmsterdam speakers and performers.
Feel free to tweet us your own big questions. Use the #BigQuestions hashtag and tweet to @TEDxAms. You can also ask or respond to questions on Facebook or here on Medium. If we like your response, we might use it in a post (with attribution, of course).
We hope to hear from you,
