How Can A Paradox Exist?

Actually I was referring to the "TRUE" nature of the world, not to the "PERCEIVED" nature. We do not have perfect knowledge of the world, that's neither news nor something that should make us doubt wether there is at all a 'truth'.

 

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There is a difference between accuracy of numbers and truth value, because with the data you've given, it's FALSE to say that the Cepheid is 100 light years away. it's only true to say that it is 100 light years, +/- 15%. (BTW, that's what real scientists do.)

I also shudder at any system that sacrifices whole truth for the sake of convenience.

 

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agreed

Hear hear!

 

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There wasn't a single paradox in there.

There is no such thing as a paradox. The idea of a paradox only exists as an abstract thought. Everything in the universe makes sense. There are no contradictions in the universe. Truth is absoulute, either something is true, or it is not. Simple as that. Paradoxes and contradictions and "shades of grey of the truth" only exist in abstract because of imperfections.

 

Because of imperfections in lagnuage/communication.

 

Easy, you go back in time and kill your grandmother. If she died before givin birth to your mother, then she could never have given birth to you. Therefor you could never have gone back in time to kill your grandmother.

There's one right there

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I'll assume you're not trying to be funny in case someone might actually think that's a paradox.

1 - You can't go back in time.
2 - If you could, you would end up in another timeline and you would be altering that timeline, not your own. What's happened has happened. There's no way to change it.

 

If 1 is true that's all you need. How do you get 2? What's the justification for 1?

I expect you justify the two statements by stating, essentially, a paradox cannot exist. That's just begging the question.

Why can't I go back in time? And if you're so certain that you can't, why do you think that if you could you'd enter another timeline? I don't follow.

 

If you go back in time there would be a paradox, which is impossible, so the assumption is that if time travel were possible you would have to enter another timeline in order to avoid a paradox.
That you can't go back in time is really just my personal belief, but I really don't think I'll be proven wrong.

 

We can't go back in time because doing so would contravene the laws of thermodynamics. If I broke a plate yesterday a certain amount of energy will have been dissipated in the proces. To go back to one minute before I broke the plate would entail finding the plate whole. But to find the plate whole would mean that the energy expended in breaking it would be available to put it together. But that energy is no longer available; it has been dissipated. Hence I cannot go back and find the plate whole because the energy books would not balance , so to speak.

 

fuzzy logic is not about probablity. if that were true then %100 sure in fuzzy logic would be the same as true. but its possible to be completely sure that something is true yet be wrong.

fuzzy logic is about the degree to which one believes something to be true. or the amount of evidence that one has that something is true. its more of a guess than a probability.


as for the assertion that paradoxes cant occur in reality, what about the prisoners dilemma?

the judge orders that the prisoner be executed within one year. the sheriff wishes to make the prisoner suffer so he tells him that he will hang him on a day that he doesnt expect it. the prisoner asks himself 'what is the last day that the sheriff can hang me on and still keep his word'?

the dilemma is that if the prisoner deduces that day x is the last day then when that day arrived he would be expecting to be hanged therefore the sheriff cant hang him on that day and still keep his word. ie its self-referrential. its unknowable (from the prisoners point of view).

 

It's a constitutional problem.

Resulting from an over sized brain.

 

"This statement is false" isn't a paradox.

Paradoxes open up a scenario where we can understand that we lack understanding.

Schrödingers cat, for example. How can it be both dead and alive. If the cat is dead then it didn't collapse the wavefunction. But if it was alive it did collapse the wavefunction and then there is still a 50/50 chance of it being dead or alive...

Hmmm...perhaps the solution is that the cat wouldn't die, since it would never observe the consequences that caused it to die, but only the consequences that caused it to stay alive?

 

Not enough food, water, air in the box ? Any of those could be a cause of death. The cat would collapse.

 

"this statement is false."

there are different realities of something...different dimensions of realities. It just happens that some realities resemble the others. That statement I wrote has two realities to it, one speaks of itself by existing itself and the other serves its function in being a statement.

 

Paradox is the essence of the universe.

 

the thing i seem to have arrived at is this:

paradoxes can exist no problem in mind, as there is nothing to prohibit them except in the long term, as they tend to screw up a mind's capacity to interface with "reality".

in "reality" however, the physical part - paradoxes don't seem to be allowed.

 

The simplest way to enslave an honest and well-intended mind is to feed it a paradox.

Feed it a paradox, and the poor thing will then think that if it doesn't understand something, it is its own fault.

Upon which it will realize the need to declare itself faulty and evil.

After that, it is easy to break it and make it grant the paradox the status of The Truth.

 

why is that statement not a paradox?
i dont think shrodingers cat is a paradox. its either dead or alive. if nobody can observe the interior to find out, too bad for them.

 

Post quick, no time to read!

Paradox is (="defined by me") a proof that the premises of the statement are wrongly constructed.

Say, for one, what happens when an unmovable objects gets hit by an unstoppable force?

The simple answer is simply that there can not be an unstoppable force in the same reality as an unmovable object. Unstoppable force must, by necessity, have infinite amount of energy. Unmovable object must, likewise, have a depository of infinite energy; Otherwise they could be stopped, or moved, by some excessive amount of energy.

And you cannot have two times infinite amount of energy; one might argue that you cannot even have one (if you assume that energy must be finite in the universe). But, by definition, infinite is at least "everything within a system"; and it cannot be divided or multiplied without changing the amount of energy it has.

Therefore the paradox cannot be solved, but can be made irrelevant by changing the definitions of the statement to something more sensible.