Key Questions & Open Issues Catalogue

"We must know. We will know." - David Hilbert, after proposing his Program to establish a formal basis for all mathematics.

This project consists of two elements.

The first relates to key questions, and develops a list of the most fundamental questions we can ask about ourselves and the world. Broadly speaking, these are the answers to the question What's a good question? These are questions such as What am I? How did I arise? What is the consequence of existence? What is this environment? What is my relationship to it? Why are things the way that they are? Analysing such questions leads us to the identification of of our most fundamental concepts, which are key to an understanding of the underpinnings of our paradigm. It's the clarification of these concepts and their relationships that allow us to develop a systematic model of the ontological roots of our paradigm. For more information on this please refer to the Fundamental Concepts Analysis project.

The second is more directly developed from the anomalies evidence. Here we analyse the current paradigm for consistency and adequacy against the evidence in our Anomalies Catalogue, and in this way develop a set of Open Issues that reflect the areas where science may have to develop significant shifts in perspective. These areas are represented as well-formed (i.e. clear and meaningful) questions. The work here starts by posing questions such as Can consciousness survive death of the physical body? , which might be prompted by say evidence of apparitions and near-death experiences. The question is then broken down into more fundamental questions, such as what do we mean by "consciousness"?, can we give a meaningful definition of consciousness without reference to a physical entity?, and what is a suitable test for the presence of consciousness in the living?. These are the sorts of questions that can be tackled scientifically, and they are the ones that feed through to the Research Agenda .