Questions With No Answers
In today’s post I’m going to break two of my cardinal rules for these things. 1st, I don’t think I’m going to be terribly funny, sorry, I’ll try to toss in a joke or two, but I’m not sure if it’ll happen. 2nd, I’m going to talk (briefly) about my day. A thousand apologies, but it’s necessary to the topic of my interest, and trust me it’s nothing gossipy or any nonsense like that.
Okay, so here’s what I did today in my Business Economics class: I (semi) proved to myself that given a n-sided polygon with all interior angles measuring less than 180 degrees, and line segments joining all vertices in the shortest distance possible, the total number of intersections of line segments will be n choose 4 (in other words n! divided by [4! times (n-4)!]).
Now, there are several questions you might be asking yourself right now. One of those might be WHAT THE FUCK IS HE TALKING ABOUT? assuming geometry is not your strongest subject. Rest assured that doesn’t matter. All you need to understand is that I spent over an hour focusing on a bizarrely specific math problem, with no applications I can see, for no particular reason. So the natural second question would be, why the hell did I do that?
And that’s a good question. I’m not totally sure I have the answer, but I thought about it a bit on the way home, and here are my thoughts.
I am not like other people.
I realize that probably doesn’t come as a huge shock to most of you. I’ve been called the “dorkiest/weirdest/most insane person I’ve ever met” a number of times, and things like this contribute to that. But allow me to elaborate on the thought.
I am of the feeling that most people (not all people, but most people) divide the questions that come up in life into two categories: questions the answers to which would be useful, and questions the answers to which would be of no real benefit. So to most of you, there are questions like “How can I make my roommates do a higher percentage of the chores than I?” and “What is the historical origin of chores?” The first category being ones you try to get answered, and the second being ones you don’t worry about very much.
Now that’s not to say that you aren’t interested in the answers to those second-category questions. Were a show to pop on about it, or a book to come out about it, you might look into it and find out the answer, but you aren’t really concerned if you don’t. Whereas the first category you might actively try to get answered, and be disappointed if you can’t.
I do not seem to divide questions into those categories. I divide them into questions I can easily answer and questions that do not have readily obtainable answers.
Let me temper that statement by saying that sometimes I do use the typical categories and sometimes I use that second standard, based on what are probably a complex set of circumstances that aren’t particularly interesting.
Here’s the crux of the matter though. Whereas other people usually only become interested in finding an answer to a question if they can see a benefit from it, I seem to become interested in answering questions mainly when I realize it would be hard to do so.
If a question pops up that I know I can easily look up in the library, I don’t usually bother to do so. I may if it’s obviously an answer that will come in handy somehow, but I’m not usually that interested in finding out (possibly because I know I can do it later). But if a question pops up that there isn’t the answer written down in some convenient location, I often become consumed by it.
This is interesting to me for a variety of reasons, most of which are not the point of my rambling here. Here’s the one that is: I think this is why I spend so much time thinking about God, death, love, and the “bigger” questions.
I don’t know just how much time other people spend thinking about these things, but I imagine it’s less than I do (for most people).
Most people seem to be content (in my eyes) to say “Well, I don’t really know if there’s a God or not, so I’ll either (a) make an assumption one way or the other and leave it at that or (b) accept that I will probably never know and stop thinking about it.”
And people seem content to a similar type of answer when it comes to the meaning of life, what love is, what happens when we die, and all those. Either they make a leap of faith, or they decide to live without that answer (and if it should pop up sometime, that’d be cool, but if not whatever, no big deal).
I’ve never really been able to accept either of those options. Instead I think and think and think about these things, usually making little if any progress. Sometimes I might read books I think will be helpful, but generally it’s just thinking on my own. And I continue this thinking in light of the fact that I can’t imagine ever coming to the answer (or a answer or something depending on your particular view of the nature of truth).
What makes it stranger still to me is that I don’t want these answers because I believe they will be of great benefit. It might be the case that they would. Maybe if I knew the nature of the existence of a higher being that would make the way I live my life dramatically different. But I don’t particularly expect that to be the case, although who knows maybe it would be.
The point here is that I’m pretty confident I don’t think about these things because I see some benefit from the answer, I think about these things because I can’t answer them.
Having spent all that time getting to that statement, the natural question would be so what? Who gives a damn why you sit around thinking about these things? Well, I guess no one really, but as usual, I’m not doing this for the groupies.
I’d like to be able to explain why I feel a need to deal with questions I don’t have answers to, but I can’t say. I’m pretty confident that this is what makes me different, on a day to day basis, than most other people, but I’m not in any way capable of saying why it should be that way.
Which makes for the latest question that I can’t answer and will thus consume my thoughts for the next week and a half: why do I see answering unanswerable questions as important?
I think you can make some sort of case for the pursuit of knowledge (it’s in the journey blah blah blah, striving for greatness, human achievement, blah blah blah) but frankly, I don’t think that’s what it is for me. Which is going to bug me now.
I realize this particular rambling is probably rather unfulfilling for any of you who have been waiting for one. I promise (and I’ll keep this one) that in the next week or two, I’m going to finally post some thoughts on sex, and rest assured, they will be considerably more humorous than my thoughts were today, or at least they will be intended to be.
But for today, this was on my mind, and this was what I wanted to talk about. If it prompted any thoughts or comments, I’d love to hear them. And if you’re just annoyed that this post didn’t have a particularly strong statement or much humor, well trust me, I’m more annoyed about it than you are.
(originally written October 11th)
Okay, so here’s what I did today in my Business Economics class: I (semi) proved to myself that given a n-sided polygon with all interior angles measuring less than 180 degrees, and line segments joining all vertices in the shortest distance possible, the total number of intersections of line segments will be n choose 4 (in other words n! divided by [4! times (n-4)!]).
Now, there are several questions you might be asking yourself right now. One of those might be WHAT THE FUCK IS HE TALKING ABOUT? assuming geometry is not your strongest subject. Rest assured that doesn’t matter. All you need to understand is that I spent over an hour focusing on a bizarrely specific math problem, with no applications I can see, for no particular reason. So the natural second question would be, why the hell did I do that?
And that’s a good question. I’m not totally sure I have the answer, but I thought about it a bit on the way home, and here are my thoughts.
I am not like other people.
I realize that probably doesn’t come as a huge shock to most of you. I’ve been called the “dorkiest/weirdest/most insane person I’ve ever met” a number of times, and things like this contribute to that. But allow me to elaborate on the thought.
I am of the feeling that most people (not all people, but most people) divide the questions that come up in life into two categories: questions the answers to which would be useful, and questions the answers to which would be of no real benefit. So to most of you, there are questions like “How can I make my roommates do a higher percentage of the chores than I?” and “What is the historical origin of chores?” The first category being ones you try to get answered, and the second being ones you don’t worry about very much.
Now that’s not to say that you aren’t interested in the answers to those second-category questions. Were a show to pop on about it, or a book to come out about it, you might look into it and find out the answer, but you aren’t really concerned if you don’t. Whereas the first category you might actively try to get answered, and be disappointed if you can’t.
I do not seem to divide questions into those categories. I divide them into questions I can easily answer and questions that do not have readily obtainable answers.
Let me temper that statement by saying that sometimes I do use the typical categories and sometimes I use that second standard, based on what are probably a complex set of circumstances that aren’t particularly interesting.
Here’s the crux of the matter though. Whereas other people usually only become interested in finding an answer to a question if they can see a benefit from it, I seem to become interested in answering questions mainly when I realize it would be hard to do so.
If a question pops up that I know I can easily look up in the library, I don’t usually bother to do so. I may if it’s obviously an answer that will come in handy somehow, but I’m not usually that interested in finding out (possibly because I know I can do it later). But if a question pops up that there isn’t the answer written down in some convenient location, I often become consumed by it.
This is interesting to me for a variety of reasons, most of which are not the point of my rambling here. Here’s the one that is: I think this is why I spend so much time thinking about God, death, love, and the “bigger” questions.
I don’t know just how much time other people spend thinking about these things, but I imagine it’s less than I do (for most people).
Most people seem to be content (in my eyes) to say “Well, I don’t really know if there’s a God or not, so I’ll either (a) make an assumption one way or the other and leave it at that or (b) accept that I will probably never know and stop thinking about it.”
And people seem content to a similar type of answer when it comes to the meaning of life, what love is, what happens when we die, and all those. Either they make a leap of faith, or they decide to live without that answer (and if it should pop up sometime, that’d be cool, but if not whatever, no big deal).
I’ve never really been able to accept either of those options. Instead I think and think and think about these things, usually making little if any progress. Sometimes I might read books I think will be helpful, but generally it’s just thinking on my own. And I continue this thinking in light of the fact that I can’t imagine ever coming to the answer (or a answer or something depending on your particular view of the nature of truth).
What makes it stranger still to me is that I don’t want these answers because I believe they will be of great benefit. It might be the case that they would. Maybe if I knew the nature of the existence of a higher being that would make the way I live my life dramatically different. But I don’t particularly expect that to be the case, although who knows maybe it would be.
The point here is that I’m pretty confident I don’t think about these things because I see some benefit from the answer, I think about these things because I can’t answer them.
Having spent all that time getting to that statement, the natural question would be so what? Who gives a damn why you sit around thinking about these things? Well, I guess no one really, but as usual, I’m not doing this for the groupies.
I’d like to be able to explain why I feel a need to deal with questions I don’t have answers to, but I can’t say. I’m pretty confident that this is what makes me different, on a day to day basis, than most other people, but I’m not in any way capable of saying why it should be that way.
Which makes for the latest question that I can’t answer and will thus consume my thoughts for the next week and a half: why do I see answering unanswerable questions as important?
I think you can make some sort of case for the pursuit of knowledge (it’s in the journey blah blah blah, striving for greatness, human achievement, blah blah blah) but frankly, I don’t think that’s what it is for me. Which is going to bug me now.
I realize this particular rambling is probably rather unfulfilling for any of you who have been waiting for one. I promise (and I’ll keep this one) that in the next week or two, I’m going to finally post some thoughts on sex, and rest assured, they will be considerably more humorous than my thoughts were today, or at least they will be intended to be.
But for today, this was on my mind, and this was what I wanted to talk about. If it prompted any thoughts or comments, I’d love to hear them. And if you’re just annoyed that this post didn’t have a particularly strong statement or much humor, well trust me, I’m more annoyed about it than you are.
(originally written October 11th)
posted by drs at 5:42 PM
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