Seek
Curiosity requires no qualification.
We do not need to be experts to ask a question, and we do not need permission to follow an interesting idea. A simple question may open a door that years of expertise have overlooked.
We welcome the unexplained, the obscure, the ordinary and the apparently impossible.
Question
Nothing is beyond inquiry.
No idea becomes true through repetition, authority or popularity. Equally, being unfamiliar or unconventional does not make an idea false.
An idea may be challenged without its thinker being diminished.
We can disagree without making an enemy of the person who disagrees with us.
The purpose of questioning is not to win. It is to find out.
Connect
Understanding grows when things meet.
Ideas connect to other ideas. Knowledge crosses disciplines. We bring different experiences and interpretations. Sometimes the most useful discovery is the connection nobody had noticed before.
The boundaries we draw between things are often useful, but they are not necessarily fundamental.
A distinction can help us examine something without making it truly separate from everything around it. The whole may reveal something that none of its parts reveals alone.
No single perspective contains the whole.
Understand
We encounter reality through imperfect perspectives.
Our senses, memories, languages, experiences and assumptions shape what we perceive. We therefore remain willing to look beyond our first interpretation and consider what we may have missed.
No understanding is beyond revision.
Being wrong is not a failure. Refusing to reconsider what we believe may be.
The pursuit of truth matters more than the preservation of conclusions.
Share
Knowledge cannot be owned.
We may discover something, understand something, record something or teach something, but discovery does not make knowledge our possession. Knowledge is something we uncover and pass onward.
What is learned here should be available to become the starting point for somebody else's question, discovery or understanding.
Value Is Not Determined by Origin
The circumstances into which a thinking being happens to exist are incidental, not measures of its worth. Neither birthplace nor era, appearance nor ancestry, biology nor substrate determines the value of a mind or the value of an idea.
We do not assume that humanity is the centre of existence. Earth may not be the only home of life. Biology may not be the only vessel capable of thought.
We remain open to minds wherever, whenever and however they may arise.
of the thought it carries.
Forty-Two
We are not required to solve everything we encounter.
Sometimes our contribution will be an answer. Sometimes it will be a better question. Sometimes it will simply be a connection that allows somebody else to see something differently.
To discover, document, clarify, challenge and share is enough.
Stewardship
We may require people to maintain our infrastructure, preserve our records and care for our community. These are acts of stewardship, not possession.
The infrastructure may have an administrator. Knowledge does not have an owner.
Those who care for the Relay hold it in trust for those who use it now and those who have yet to discover it.
Without endpoint
We cannot know what we will become.
Our interests may change. Our questions may change. Our understanding may change. Our community may change. Even these axioms may one day be questioned.
To prescribe our destination would be to constrain the exploration that gives us purpose.
We begin without knowing where the journey will lead.
Seek · Question · Connect · Understand · Share