“Do you still beat your wife?” A question like this, asked, say, of a nonviolent unmarried heterosexual woman, is off at so many levels that it’s basically unanswerable, requiring a huge backpedal and clarification of presumptions. Some languages actually have a term for answering questions like this, with the most iconic being the Japanese word “mu” that appears in certain Zen parables. “Does a dog have Buddha-nature, or does it not?” asks a student, and the master replies, “Mu”—meaning something like “All answers to this question are false.” Or: “Your question is, itself, false.” You can think of mu as a kind of “meta-no,” an “unasking” of the question, or even as a kind of “runtime exception.”

Brian Christian, The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Being Alive (2011)