This is a write-up of a talk I gave at Geeky
Thanks to a side project on time mapping I became interested in the design implications of a set of questions that are collectively known as the eternal questions.
1. What are eternal questions?
Eternal questions are concerned with meaning. They arise from people’s experiences with the world, and have no definitive answer. Famous questions are: what is the meaning of life? What is a good life? What makes a good person? What is beauty? What is love?
Although they cannot be answered definitively, this doesn’t mean that they cannot be productively discussed. Through the centuries countless people have come up with answers. Some believed they answered a question once and for all, others were more modest and saw their answer only as one of many possibilities.
Many of us are familiar with Douglas Adams’ answer from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy: “42″, the answer to life, the universe and everything. But there are many others:
Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?
Inspired by the simple and colourful life of Tahiti, Paul Gauguin wondered: Where did we come from? What are we? Where are we going? And came up with a surprisingly colourful answer.
In what turned out to be his final work, Dostoevsky created The Brothers Karamazov a story about three brothers and a father with very different ideas about what makes a good life.
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