If you are going to ask questions, you must first check the assumptions implicit in your question.
For example, all of the questions you posed implicitly assume one answer. They also assume that it is possible to know when a question has been answered. If you accept that there may be many answers and that no answer is ever final then the question becomes how do you actually move forward and make progress? What happens when two different answers are contradictory?
I agree, tracking down and explicitly stating all the assumptions is very important. It always reveals a lot about the structure of the problem and can help you move forward. However, my goal here was actually to pose more questions than answers and seed a discussion. Usually people avoid hard questions, but I see many clever people around here, so it's a great opportunity to discuss unusual things.
Let me think more about the implicit assumptions in my questions and I will write about them later.
I described some of the implicit assumptions in a new post, as it got too long.I'll try to address the other questions:
All questions are conditioned on the knowledge of the person, who is asking. The optimal answer depends on the person's knowledge and the question. I see the answer as a tool for setting the questioner's mind in a different state. I guess there might be many different answers, which can have the same effect.
Everyone has their own value function, which determines, whether the question is answered sufficiently. And of course, this value function is also conditioned on it's owner's current knowledge, which means that when the knowledge is updated, the value function can change it's output - that's when you realize that you understand nothing and you have to dig deeper.
I'll have to make another post for this.. :)
Well I sketched out one possibility in the OP, but I think I will have to address the question above first for it to make sense.
I believe the biggest value of posing the right questions is not to receive the "right answer", but to trigger the "right discussion"
You learn the most through having your own ideas shattered, because you're forced to reevaluate your standpoint. You either change your view based on the arguments provided (even though this is a really complicated process and people are usually not really capable of doing this) or you at least have to find more supportive arguments for your position.
Also the voting system could help us with finding of the "right" answer, even though I believe there are little areas where you would find one correct answer. The votes will be also good in depicting the scale of "correctness" of the answers.
Exactly! That's what I'm hoping for.
Maybe you choose the answer that support the previous implicit assumptions. Every philosophy is based on some fundamental assumption, and the reasoning becomes circular at some stage. At least thats my experience.