Going off Arvind's post about the meaning of life in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I consulted my trusty copy (please excuse the nerdiness) of said book.
"All I wanted to say," bellowed the computer, "is that my circuits are now irrevocably committed to calculating the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything." He paused and satisfied himself that he now had everyone's attention, before continuing more quietly. "But the program will take me a little while to run."
7.5 million years later....
"You're really not going to like it," observed Deep Thought (the computer).
"Tell us!"
"All right...The answer to the Great Question of Life, the Universe and Everything...is..."
"Yes...!!!...?"
"Forty-two," said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.
"Forty Two?!" yelled Loonquawl. "Is that all you've got to show for seven and a half million years' work?"
"I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is." (Adams 118-121)
"... the Question and the Answer are mutually exclusive. Knowledge of one logically precludes knowledge of the other. It is impossible that both can ever be known about in the same universe. ... Except, if it happened, it seems that the Question and the Answer would just cancel each other out, and take the universe with them, which would then be replaced by something even more bizarrely inexplicable." (Adams 465)
In the book, a group of mice end up building another supercomputer, what we know as Earth, in order to compute the Ultimate Answer.
Is the answer always more important than the question? Mr. Lazarow touched on this topic at the beginning of the year concerning having the better grade vs. learning something. We, however, as a society often accuse people of being inconclusive. When someone asks a question, they usually expect an answer.
The Renaissance showed that individual thought/choice was key to progress. What type of format is necessary for advancement of society? Seeking questions or discovering answers?
In AP English, do we seek to explore semantics to learn the "laws" (if there are any) of language or to create more questions?
Grace Yuan
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2 comments:
Hmmm...
I believe that the question and the answer are equally important. While both are essential for the advancement of society, the cooperation of the two creates something even better: another drop to the pool of knowledge.
I feel that curiosity is one of humanity's most useful traits. Too many times in today's society, so-called "stupid questions" are looked down upon. But I feel that one of my favorite Chinese proverbs is appropriate here: "One who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; one who does not ask a question remains a fool forever."
All of us have questions that bubble up inside of us; none of us can understand everything every time intuitively. These questions can potentially lead to enlightenment. The greatest trait about questions is that they lead onto more subjects and more questions.
However, the necessity of asking questions for information must be balanced against the folly of asking questions only for the sake of asking questions. Good questions help focus a train of thought and carry it on even further, while irrelevant ones distract us. But there is a fine line between the two, and if we try to stop irrelevant questions, we run the risk of crushing genuine ones.
Of course, we all love answers. We love them so much that we prize them over the question-making process that leads us to them. Answers are only valuable as the end result of an intense mental questioning and learning process, and asking for only the answer to a problem without learning the process achieves nothing.
For example, in mathematics, we have two wonderful tools that can give us answers: the calculator and the formula. But a calculator simply puts off real comprehension, and too often formulas are used as replacements for actual understanding. It is great that we all know the quadratic formula: But can we derive it?
We sometimes neglect learning the actual mathematical processes and questions needed to obtain the answer. A subject like Geometry that has proofs teaches us how to think, and when we skip those proofs because we already know the "answer", we miss the point of the exercise. For all proofs, we have the "answer": We know that a triangle has three sides. But can we ask the necessary questions to get there and derive the proof?
Questions are needed to obtain answers and many times, answers are useful only as the end result of a series of questions. When we place too much emphasis on one and neglect the other, we are just missing the point.
(Eric Wei)
It just occurred to me that maybe we seek answers, and in doing so, find ourselves raising more questions. I apologize for I have not read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (underlined) and hope that I do not sound too ignorant in my responses to this post.
Grace's lesson reminded me of a sign hanging in Mrs. Ericson's room which I have stared at many a time during AP Biology (but not TOO often, I promise). It states, simply, "Learning begins when we don't know the answer." Let's be straightforward with our thinking. If I knew EVERYTHING there is to know about language, would I even be participating in this blog? The answer, however, is that I have recently found that my knowledge of language/semantics is very minute, and thus I take and learn from this blog each and every day.
Yet the more information I seem to gain, the more questions seem to flood my mind, and the cycle is continuous. (Is it just me, or has this become a common theme in our class? Even the Toulmin Method is cyclical with its aspects: claim, qualifer, grounds, warrant, backing, and rebuttle. The rebuttle has the ability to turn into yet another claim...you get the picture.)
On a personal note, I should add that were it not for the existence of questioning, I would be a rather helpless human being.
(Samantha Maliha)
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