Question: Tell Me What You Think About…
Questions. What I have learned from over 6years in 6 minutes
“Just ask.”
He went on to sip his preferred drink that evening.
“Most people never ask. It’s amazing what you can get from asking”
My friend, Don told the four of us that night.
We had met that evening to exchange club merchandise. The same merchandise he had designed.
Don is a don of a designer. He does some of his best work for free.
Under the influence of one or two sips, he changes into a philosopher. He reminds me of David Hume, the Philosopher. He lived at the time of the forgotten Scottish Enlightenment.
I’d wager that Scotland gave more to us because of booze than any other country. Almost everything we have today is attributable to them.
And booze.
This evening, Don reminded us of one simple yet feared approach we could all learn to live by — asking. It is amazing what you can get from asking.
It does not have to be a person. It can be an idea.
Here’s a small expose into my sequence of questions in no particular order. These questions, and others, led me to my understanding of the current theory of evolution and its pitfalls.
Questions are the Jack Sparrows of Life
Like Jack Sparrow, I never knew where any one question would lead.
But still, I kept on asking.
Blindly.
Innocently.
Daily.
It was 2017 when these questions took to life and never stopped. The answers I got were not satisfactory.
What is natural selection?
Why is everything explained away by natural selection?
Why did the Neanderthal man have a bigger brain for body size compared to the modern man?
Why did they not succeed if were attribute our society’s progress to our brain power?
These questions did not form in this sequence, but they are some of the questions I started asking myself.
And they got wilder. Soon enough, you get so many questions with no clear answers, you start to wonder how to progress.
How do you filter all these?
The sweet spot in the questions territory
Our brain is a filter.
It filters what we understand based on our past experiences. If we come across something new, we either
- crash and get angry
- become curious and dig further or
- simply give up and say there are things we just can’t know.
I don’t like the last option. It admits defeat early in the game.
Questions should not be indicative of the last minute or second when the game is about to end. Questions should signal when the whistle is blown, for the game to start.
And games can be very unpredictable. The more unpredictable, the better.
Just the same, you never know where a question can take you.
So the last option of simply giving up is one I don’t like.
The first one is difficult to control. There is a question I used to dread when I saw the late Prof. Hassan Saidi close by. He would listen to your idea, seek clarification, and at the end of it all, you hope he never asks:
Despite the answer I would give, it would feel flimsy.
Weak.
Incomplete.
Undefendable.
And he knew it. You could see it in his eyes. And the witty smile that followed. He knew how to nudge you forward with rigor but with no ill intention. I will always be grateful for the sessions we had with him because he always left me feeling ignorant.
Ignorant with a purpose. To reduce my ignorance.
So the first option is also a position I don’t like to be in.
The sweet spot is in the middle. That second option avails itself when you become curious. You dig further.
What becomes bigger when you take more of it?
A hole
I dug myself into a hole. Question after question, I found unsatisfactory answers.
Let me share some crucial questions I asked about the gene-centered theory of evolution.
If the gene holds central control, why do we arbitrarily stop at the gene and not the immediate step before the gene got activated? And if there are downstream effects, why do we still attribute it to the gene? Can we all attribute the actions inside the cell to the gene?
These questions on the gene-centered view of life led me to discover epigenetics. At the time, I did not know it was called epigenetics. I only knew reducing every aspect of life to the gene was defeatist.
One intriguing feature of epigenetics is structural inheritance.
The cell membrane can reconstitute itself without the intervention of the gene. The first person who demonstrated this mystery was Tracy Sonneborn when he was playing in the lab with paramecium.
The other question I did not have answers to centered around consciousness.
Why did consciousness emerge? Can we say a single cell is conscious? What of an atom, is it conscious or do we like to think only complex beings are conscious?
These questions revealed to me the inadequacy of the theories of evolution. We only know of the survival of the fittest. These are the attributes an organism has that aid in its dominance at any particular time in history.
What about the arrival of the fittest?
Another question.
We talk of the existence of consciousness but have no answer for the arrival of consciousness.
I developed an answer to this question. It is one of the answers I am most proud of about my theory. I never saw it coming.
I was seated in the lower bunk of my niece’s bed, in Mucatha, Kiambu. I was reading The Book of Why by Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie.
Then it hit me!
I remember standing up and fitting the pieces together. My eyes were wide open, but it was not the pile of clothes I was staring at. It was the ideas playing in my mind.
It all made sense!
Probability would solve this problem. I was so ecstatic you could see the calculations running in my mind.
I had developed an idea that would give an answer to the emergence of consciousness. Who wouldn’t beam with excitement?
The series of questions I had started asking myself in 2017 ended up creating a book
I published it in 2022.
But I still have more questions than answers.
Yes, I answered some of the questions I had back then. But I have even more questions now.
They have to do with clarity of thought, delivery of punchline messages, and more about evolution.
How can a theory of evolution work in the context of species yet the first organism has no species context to work with? Does it lack meaning in the grand scheme of evolution? Why should it not be relevant yet we are here debating its relevance because it existed in the first place?
I have come to love and hate that I love such questions.
I love them because I create holes in ideas we think are set in stone.
I hate that I love these questions because some bug me so much, I can lose sleep over them.
Finally, this excerpt summarizes what I’ve learned about questions
I came across one article by Jason Fried, which solidified my obsession with questions. He talks about the three hours he spent with Clayton Christensen.
The one response Clay gave which has stuck with me ever since was:
“Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven’t asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go. It hits your mind and bounces right off. You have to ask the question — you have to want to know — in order to open up the space for the answer to fit.”
Questions are places in your mind where answers fit.
If you stop asking questions, your mind can’t grow. This bit knocked the wind out of me. Then brought me back to reality.
I have never questioned my questions since then.
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