uTOK

Aug 14, 2023

Searching for answers: Why asking questions make us uniquely human Credit: Flickr (Public Domain) What makes human consciousness unique? Why did it evolve the way it did? How do we know? Interestingly, the simple act of posing these questions gives us a major clue as to what the answer is. According to the Unified Theory of Knowledge (UTOK), the key to understanding human consciousness is to focus carefully on how the evolution of propositions is tightly associated with the capacity to ask questions. This, in turn, gives rise to the problem of justification. Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter. Consider words like who, what, when, where, how, and why. These question stems can be thought of as docking into the proposition and opening up the adjacent negative space. This tension between the positive space taken up by propositions and the negative space opened up by questions is something UTOK calls the question-answer dynamic. This is crucial to understand because it results in the evolutionary tipping point that transformed us from primates into self-conscious persons who are developmentally socialized to become actors on the cultural stage. … This observation suggests that the capacity to ask questions necessarily motivated the search for answers. UTOK calls the problem of generating legitimate answers to questions the problem of justification. And it was the problem of justification that drove the evolution of human consciousness in a unique way.