What is the last question?

After 20 years, the Edge.org annual question exercise seems to have run out of steam. John Brockman, author of "The Third Culture" and the guru who has led the effort, says:

After twenty years, I’ve run out of questions. So, for the finale to a noteworthy Edge project, can you ask "The Last Question"?

Two hundred and eightyfour respondents offer single sentence questions. Scrolling through these, I pull out a few that strike me, sometimes suggesting my immediate flippant answer to the question:

Are complex biological neural systems fundamentally unpredictable? (Yes)

Are the simplest bits of information in the brain stored at the level of the neuron? (No)

Does consciousness reside only in our brains? (No)

Can consciousness exist in an entity without a self-contained physical body? (Yes)

Is there a fundamental difference between the biological world and the physical world? (No)

Will some things about life, consciousness, and society necessarily remain unseen? (Yes)

Will we soon cease to care whether we are experiencing normal, augmented, or virtual reality? (Yes)

Is our brain fundamentally limited in its ability to understand the external world? (Yes)

And, finding myself running out of steam only a quarter of the way through the list, I zoom to the end and find Robert Sapolsky's question:

Given the nature of life, the purposeless indifference of the universe, and our complete lack of free will, how is it that most people avoid ever being clinically depressed?

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