These unsolved questions continue to vex the minds of practitioners across all disciplines of modern science and humanities.
Besides the ubiquitous “If a tree falls in the forest” logic problem, innumerable mysteries continue to vex the minds of practitioners across all disciplines of modern science and humanities.
Questions like “Is there a universal definition of ‘word’?”, “Is color in our minds or does it exist physically inherent to objects in the world around us?”, and “What is the probability that the sun will rise tomorrow?” continue to plague even the most astute of minds. Pulling from medicine, physics, biology, philosophy and mathematics, here are some of the most fascinating unanswered questions in the world — do you have the answer to any of them?
Interesting Unsolved Problems: Why Do Cells Commit Suicide?
The biochemical event known as apoptosis is sometimes referred to as “programmed cell death” or “cellular suicide.” For reasons that science has yet to fully grasp, cells appear to have the ability to “die off” in a highly regulated, anticipated way that is entirely different from necrosis (cell death caused by disease or injury). Somewhere between 50-80 billion cells die as a result of programmed cell death in the average human body every single day, but the mechanism behind it and even the intent is not widely understood.
On the one hand, too much programmed cell death leads to atrophy of muscles and has been implicated in diseases that cause extreme but otherwise unexplained muscular weakness, whereas too little apoptosis allows cells to proliferate, which can lead to cancer. The general concept of apoptosis was first described by German scientist Karl Vogt in 1842. Much progress has been made in understanding it, but the process’s deeper mysteries still abound.
The Computational Theory Of Mind
Some scholars liken the activities of the mind to the way a computer processes information. As such, the Computational Theory of Mind was developed in the mid-1960s, when man and machine first began to grapple with one another’s existence in earnest. Put simply, imagine that your brain is a computer and your mind is the operational system that it runs.
When put into the context of computer science, it’s a riveting analogy to make: in theory, programs produce outputs based solely on a series of inputs (external stimuli, sight, sound, etc.) and memory (which here means both a physical hard drive and our psychological memory). Programs are run by algorithms which have a finite number of steps, repeated according to the receipt of various inputs. Like the brain, a computer must make representations of what it cannot physically compute–and this is one of the major supportive arguments in favor of this particular theory.
However, Computational Theory differs from the Representational Theory of the Mind in that it allows that not all states are representational (like depression) and thus are not going to respond to computational-based treatment. The problem is more a philosophical one than anything else: the computational theory of mind works well, except when it comes to defining how to “reprogram” brains that are depressed. We can’t reboot ourselves to factory settings.
The Hard Problem Of Consciousness
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In philosophical dialogues, “consciousness” is known as qualia, and the problem of qualia has plagued humankind probably forever. Qualia describes individual instances of subjective, conscious experience — an example of which would be the pain of a headache. We all have experienced that pain, but there’s no way to measure whether or not we’ve experienced it identically, or even that there truly is a singular experience of pain at all, since the experience of pain manifests based on our perception of it.
While many have made scientific attempts to concretely define consciousness, no one has developed a universally accepted theory. Some philosophers wonder if it even matters. Patricia Smith Churchland once famously remarked, “Pixie dust in the synapses is about as explanatorily powerful as quantum coherence in the microtubules.”
The Gettier Problem
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This might be a roundabout origin of the “Your argument is invalid” meme. The Gettier Problem asks, “If a piece of information is true but someone believes it for invalid reasons, does it count as knowledge?” It’s a logic puzzle of the most frustrating kind, because it asks us to consider whether or not truth is a universal constant. It crops up in a wide range of thought experiments and philosophical arguments, including that of Justified True Belief:
A subject S knows that a proposition P is true if and only if:
S believes that P is true, and
S is justified in believing that P is true
Critics of both Gettier-style problems in philosophy and Justified True Belief suggest that it’s impossible to justify anything which is not true (where “truth” is a construct designed for the sake of argument as being some irrefutable fact). Struggling to define not only what it means for something to be true, but also what it means for someone to believe it to be so, has clear moral and ethical implications from everything to criminal law to medicine.
Are Colors All In Our Mind?
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One of the most fascinating quandaries in human experience is that of color perception: do physical objects in our world possess colors that we then recognize and process, or is the concept of color entirely within our minds?
We know that color exists through varying light frequencies, but when it comes to our experience of color, our agreed upon nomenclature and the simple fact that our minds would probably explode if we suddenly had to assimilate a new, never-before-seen color in our universal palette, the idea continues to fascinate scientists, philosophers and anyone who has ever spent an afternoon lost in a Sherwin Williams alike.
What Is Dark Matter?
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Astrophysicists know what dark matter isn’t, but this definition through exclusion isn’t exactly satisfying; while we can’t see the celestial stuff through even the most powerful telescope, scientists project that it accounts for the vast majority of the universe. It doesn’t give off or absorb light, but the differences in gravitational effects among large physical bodies (planets and the like) caused scientists to hypothesize that something unseen was playing a major role in their motion.
A theory first proposed in 1932 was, simply, the problem of “missing mass”. Black matter’s existence is entirely inferred, but the scientific community has generally come to accept its existence as a matter of fact; whatever it is, exactly.
The Sunrise Problem
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What is the probability that the sun will rise tomorrow? Philosophers and statisticians have been asking this question for millennia, trying to ascribe an irrefutable formula for the daily event. The question is meant to demonstrate the limitations of probability theory and, to some extent, is the mathematical equivalent of “you know what they say about the word ‘assume’ — makes an ‘ass’ out of ‘u’ and ‘me’.”
The difficulty arises when we consider that there is a lot of variance between a single person’s prior knowledge, humanity’s prior knowledge, and the universe’s prior knowledge, of the sun rising.
If p is the long-run frequency of sunrises and the uniform probability distribution is applied to p, then the value of p increases with each day that the sun actually does rise and we (the individual, humanity, the universe) see it happen.
The 137th Element
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Named for Richard Feynman, the proposed final element of the Periodic Table, Feynmanium, is a theoretical element that marks the last possible element that could exist; to go beyond #137 would require electrons to travel faster than the speed of light. It’s been proposed that elements above 124 would lack the stability to exist for more than a few nanoseconds, meaning that an element as high up as Feynmanium would be destroyed by spontaneous fission before it could ever be properly studied.
What’s even more interesting is that the number 137 was not chosen arbitrarily by Feynman as the cutoff point; he believed that it possessed great numerological significance, since “1/137 = almost precisely the value of the so-called fine-structure constant (), the dimensionless quantity that defines the strength of the electromagnetic interaction.”
The big question is, will an element ever exist above those set points where they become theoretical, and will it happen in the course of human life as we know it?
Is There A Universal Definition Of The Word, “Word”?
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In linguistics, a word is the smallest utterance you can make that possesses some kind of meaning: either in the practical sense or the literal sense. A morpheme, while smaller and still able to communicate meaning, can’t always stand on its own conversationally. While you can see “—ness” and understand what it means (essence of), it wouldn’t be conversationally useful to you.
Every language in the world has its own lexicon which is subdivided into lemmas, which are the canonical form of particular words. Lemmas are extremely important in languages that rely heavily on inflection. Again, in the most general sense, a word is meant to be the smallest unit of speech that can stand alone and have meaning; though the fallacy in this definition comes in the form of words like “the” which don’t possess meaning on their own, free of surrounding context.
The One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge
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Since it began in 1964, around 1,000 people have applied for the Paranormal Challenge and no one has yet won the prize. The James Randi Educational Foundation offers $1 million to anyone who can scientifically prove a supernatural or paranormal ability. Over the years many high-profile psychic mediums have been encouraged to apply, though they categorically have declined. In order to apply, an individual is required to have a reference from an academic institution or some other “endorsement” of their respective sanity.
Even though not one of the 1,000 applicants proved their psychic ability in an observable, scientifically measurable way, Randi has said that “very few” of the applicants considered that their failure was caused by a lack of ability. Mostly, they just attributed it to nerves.
Since the foundation is offering a fairly well-backed strategy for measuring the viability of the claims of people like John Edwards, it’s kind of ironic that the overwhelming response is, “don’t validate me actually.” But then again, if one is to possess supernatural powers, it by definition cannot be explained by natural laws. And therein lies the problem.
