I think it is entertaining and challenging to address big questions that have been debated for thousands of years and to take a stab at trying to answer them, or at least contributing some different or original color to the debates.
There are even Wikipedia pages with lists of open conjectures or problems in various academic fields:
• Unsolved problems in astronomy
• Unsolved problems in biology
• Unsolved problems in chemistry
• Unsolved problems in computer science
• Unsolved problems in economics
• Unsolved problems in fair division
• Unsolved problems in geoscience
• Unsolved problems in information theory
• Unsolved problems in linguistics
• Unsolved problems in mathematics
• Unsolved problems in medicine
• Unsolved problems in philosophy
• Unsolved problems in physics
• Unsolved problems in statistics
Some of these questions may be:
– How did life originate?
– How did sexual reproduction evolve?
– How did multicellular organisms evolve?
– Why is society organized in hierarchies?
– How and when did anatomically modern humans arise?
The great problem of these types of questions is that they are unanswered precisely because of the difficulty to produce evidence of the causality of those subjects; many times because they happened so long ago, the chain of events is practically erased from the record.
Then you have the big abstract questions:
– What is information?
– What is time?
– What is justice?
– What is life?
– What is the difference between body and consciousness? (this is related to the body-soul, body-spirit, and Plato’s dualism view)
– What is money?
I think all of the above are not answerable yet, at least at our current level of evolution, because they are all mental constructs, not questions about reality or concrete external objects.
I am skeptical of the scientific method, not because it doesn’t make sense, because, of course it does, but because it runs on human minds, and, in the end, it does not escape subjectivectivity and personal values.
For example, the “follow the science” fallacy: in reality “the science” means the opinions and biased world views of the human scientists based on their experiments and data, which many times may or may not be accurate.
Even General Relativity is in question due to the trick of inventing the concepts of dark energy and dark matter to explain macro-phenomena, and Quantum Mechanics is subject to interpretations such as the Copenhagen Interpretation.
I read recently that even Schrödinger was passionate about topics such as existence, religion (primarily eastern), consciousness, and related abstractions.
However, I can obviously see the need to anchor unproven explanations, hypotheses, and predictions to something more concrete. It’s just that each individual needs to decide who to trust, when to be skeptical, and when to do their own bias-free research.
