How do you find a question worth asking?
In 1978, on BBC radio, in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a computer named Deep Thought answers forty-two. Nobody had asked a proper question.
My sort of philosophical foundation is in line with Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Everyone has their sort of favorite philosopher, but my favorite philosopher is Douglas Adams.
And what he was essentially saying is, “The universe is the answer; what are the questions?”
And if we expand the scope and scale of consciousness, then we are better able to understand what questions to ask. We’ll learn more, we’ll become more enlightened. And so we should try to do the things that expand the scope and scale of consciousness.
In late 2025 he tells Nikhil Kamath the plot again.
Subtitles
Earth turns out to be this computer to figure out the answer of the meaning of life, and it comes up with the answer 42. And then it’s like, what the heck does 42 mean? And it turns out, well, actually the hard part is the question, not the answer. And for that you need a much bigger computer than Earth. So basically what Douglas Adams was saying is that we actually don’t know how to frame the questions properly. And so I think by expanding the scope and scale of consciousness we can better understand what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe.