I saw graffiti on a wall showing two characters arguing with each other. One said, ‘Question Everything!’ The other said, ‘Why?’
I was introduced to a body of work on cognitive style that highlights 40 years of research on the predictable differences in the way people think. People do not think alike yet can anyone suggest any management strategies in any organisation or in society that recognizes these differences and allows for different styles of thinkers to thrive? I have asked this question for ten years and found just one organisation that shaped approaches for different style of thinkers. The cost to organisations and societies for not recognizing these predicable differences is tremendous. You see it in our cliches. For some, seeing the glass as half full is positive. For others it is negative as you fail to see that the glass as twice the potential. As such, seeing the glass as half empty is positive as you twice the potential. Yet society thinks seeing the glass as half full is seen as positive; it can also be seen as accepting the mediocrity of the status quo.

El nino and la niña are natural weather phenomena. Climate change is not. Is a scientist or two measuring co2 in the australian atmosphere so that we can mitigate our behaviour and transit to market in a considered way. This affects peoples living standards. Let’s avoid poverty!

Because I’ve never heard a satisfactory answer.

I’m genuinely curious!! Do we start to realise our own existence at the age of 7? For some, never? Or are we conscious even within the womb?

I’m interested in what is time and how it is linked to space. I wonder if it will be possible to time travel.

It confused me since I can think independently.

Travel from state to state and country to country, and regional phrases and slang make language so much richer. How do we reflect our sense of place, and sense of fun, in our choice of words?

I feel like environmental issues are so easily shut down as being unimportant, for “hippies” or are important but only as they don’t come at the expense of the economy. With so much evidence suggesting if we don’t do something, major disastrous circumstances will result. Are people living in denial? Do they believe this is just another unfounded, doomsday prophesy? And how will sustainable development ever occur if we can’t even get people on-board supporting this issue.

Although I was raised as a strict Irish-style Roman Catholic, after many years of deep thought, I am now an atheist, humanist, rationalist and sceptic, and have come to the conclusion that this is the most important unanswered philosophical question. I do not believe there is any need to postulate a creator, because belief in a creator god leads to the obvious next questions of who or what made god, and who or what made who or what made god, and so on indefinitely.

The is a unspoken assumption that questions require the mind to respond. We live in a world where the conceptual answer is no longer enough, rather the experiential or visceral response offers a different perspective .

We often have a choice between doing what we know is right, and doing what will gratify or benefit ourselves (even at the expense of others). So, why be good?

Similar to avoiding the important by tackling the urgent. Both citizens and pollies do it, more than is good for us, don’t we?

AI engineers might be doing what engineers do, working in a reductionist way on a discrete part of a problem with the ethical contexts left to someone else. The commercial drive to develop better and better AI should make us all nervous unless we have absolute transparency, ‘commercial-in-confidence’ is not helpful here.