A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
The Astley paradox.
If you ask Rick Astley for his copy of Disney Pixar's Up, he can't give it to you, because he'll never give you Up. But by not doing so, you'd be let down, and he'll never let you down.
Testing this scenario is ofc incredibly risky to the state of our reality, so the Astley paradox must remain a thought experiment.
I guess I would say the paradox of tolerance. I'm sorry but I'm just gonna yoink the definition from Wikipedia because I'm not great at explaining things:
The paradox of tolerance states that if a society's practice of tolerance is inclusive of the intolerant, intolerance will ultimately dominate, eliminating the tolerant and the practice of tolerance with them. Karl Popper describes the paradox as arising from the fact that, in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.
Bonus least favorite paradox: You need experience to get a job and you need a job to get experience.
Saw this a while ago and it solves that "paradox" nicely.
The real paradox is this opinion coming from Twitter
I think the job experience is less of a paradox and more of a Catch-22. True nonetheless
The Unexpected Hanging Paradox: A man is sentenced to death, but the judge decides to have a little fun with it. The man will be killed at noon on a day of the judge's choosing in the next week, from Monday to Friday. The only stipulation is that the man will not expect it when he's called to be killed.
The man does some quick logic in his head. If Friday is the last day he could be killed, then if he makes it to Friday without dying, he knows he must die on that day. And since that wouldn't be a surprise, he cannot be killed on Friday.
He then extends the logic. Since he can't be killed on Friday, the last day he can be killed is on Thursday. Thus, all the prior logic regarding Friday applies, and he cannot be killed on Thursday either. This then extends to Wednesday, then Tuesday, and then Monday. At the end, he grins with the knowledge that, through logic, he knows he cannot be killed on any of the days, and will therefore not be killed.
Therefore, the man is astonished when he's called to be killed on Wednesday.
Mine is similar to yours in that it's about the power of God. It's called the Epicurean Trilemma:
This proves fairly simply that God as commonly interpreted by modern Christians cannot exist. Early Christians and Jews had no problem here, because their god was simply not meant to be omnibenevolent. Go even further back in time and he was not omnipotent, and possibly not omniscient, either. "Thou shalt have no gods before me" comes from a time when proto-Jews were henotheists, people who believed in the existence of multiple deities while only worshipping a single one.
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
Just leaving God's wife Ashera here. Yes, he was married once. Look it up.
My favorite paradox is the "Stay signed in" option Microsoft gives you when signing in. Because despite keeping you signed in on every other site in existence, Microsoft, who is usually hooked into your OS, does not. Thus, stay signed in runs contradictory to one's expectations.
They aren't offering to do it, just asking if it's what you want.
Gotta check and be sure you're being annoyed as much as possible.
Alanis morissette's song ironic contains no solid cases of irony, mostly bad luck or poor timing, and is therefore ironic.
I read an interview with her once that was kind of funny and humanizing. She wrote and recorded that song before she was famous and had no idea that it would ever be heard. Then it blew up and people have been giving her shit about it for decades now.
Could you imagine if you wrote a shitty Lemmy comment that became extremely viral and people were like, "you fucking moron, how could you have written something so dumb?!"
Not you got me praying I never get famous
Not sure if its what you're talking about but I really like the Ship of Theseus thought experiment, if an object is the same object after having had all of its original components replaced. Always makes me think of if an exact clone of you is created (same thoughts, memories, etc...) should that be considered you?
In 80 to 100 days, 30 trillion [cells] will have replenishedβthe equivalent of a new you.
In essence, we are our own Ship of Theseus.
And I would venture that the answer to your question is yes, but no. The moment your exact clone experiences something you donβt, you two are no longer exactly the same. And I would wager that moment would happen very fast.
The controversial thought experiment about Star Trek transporters.
Where an individual is dematerialized in one location, transmitted as a signal somewhere else and rematerialized somewhere else.
Were they killed when they were dematerialized, cloned and a newly born entity that is an exact clone rematerialized at the other end?
Are they just killing people and recreating copies everytime they transport people?
Zeno's Paradox, even though it's pretty much resolved. If you fire an arrow at an apple, before it can get all the way there, it must get halfway there. But before it can get halfway there, it's gotta get a quarter of the way there. But before it can get a fourth of the way, it's gotta get an eighth... etc, etc. The arrow never runs out of new subdivisions it must cross. Therefore motion is actually impossible QED lol.
Obviously motion is possible, but it's neat to see what ways people intuitively try to counter this, because it's not super obvious. The tortoise race one is better but seemed more tedious to try and get across.
So the resolution lies in the secret that a decreasing trend up to infinity adds up to a finite value. This is well explained by Gabriel's horn area and volume paradox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZOi9HH5ueU
I like George Carlin's version: "If God is all powerful, can he make a rock so big that he himself can't lift it?"
Weird attribution, man :) That one, and a lot of others like it, come all the way from the 12th Century and thereabouts. Carlinβs influence is awesome and deserved, but I donβt think it stretches that far :)
Does the set of all sets that are not members of themselves, contain itself?
Russel's Paradox lit a fire under mathematics, leading to all sorts of good things (and a few bad).
There are two kinds of people in the world - those who think there are two kinds of people in the world and those who know better.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world β those who understand binary and those who donβt.
There are 2 kinds of people in the world.
If there exists a place outside time, then the only way to travel there is to already be there, and if you are there, you can never leave.
The measurement of time, the measurement of the constant of change, is very different than our experience of time. For example, you never experienced a past, you experienced Now measured as the Present, just as you are currently experiencing Now measured as the Present, and will not experience the future, it will be Now measured as the Present. All you have ever experienced is a perpetual fixed Now. This is true for all of us. All measurements of time occur within a fixed Now, so we can say all time is Now.
Depending on certain spiritual views, what we call the Now is also called the "I Am", or consciousness, or awareness, etc. This "I Am" is intangible and exists outside of time, therefore, depending on your spiritual beliefs, you are the object, existing in a place outside of time, and are already there, and have never left.
why do we park on a driveway and drive on a parkway?
A driveway is named because it was originally a circle that you could use to drive right up to the house. Think old mansions in movies.
Parkways had separated lanes with shrubberies and plants on between and around, basically parks with a road through them.
A driveway that is straight and ends in a garage isn't really a driveway. Separated lanes with no plants or parks isn't really a parkway. But the names both stuck around.
There's so many good ones, and I'd probably say Russel's (what's in the set of every set that doesn't contain itself?), but recently the unexpected hanging has come up a couple times. That one is all about how theories or rules can break if they become contingent on how an observer is thinking about them (including state of knowledge of the situation).
God clearly can't exist because an omnipotent, omniscient, and just God is a paradox already. Omnipotence and omniscience means that God, if they exist, would have full control of every moment of the universe (even if they only "acted" initially). Some (I'd argue nearly all) people suffer for reasons out of their control. Only deserved suffering is just. Since undeserved suffering exists then God cannot exist (at least omniscient, omnipotent, and just - as we understand those terms). God could be an omniscient, omnipotent asshole or sadist... God could be omniscient and just (aka the martyr God who knows of all suffering but is powerless to prevent it)... or God could be omnipotent and just (aka the naive God who you could liken to a developer running around desperately trying to spot patch problems and just making things worse).
Alternatively, by omnipotent maybe the scriptures are just hyping them up - "God is so fucking buff - this one time they lifted up this rock that was like this big. Fucking amazing."
Fermi's Paradox. There are so many stars (more than there are grains of sand on earth), that the probablility that one of them has life, and even intelligent life, is >99% . So why haven't we observed it yet? Cue a lot of brilliant people trying to answer that question.
I like GΓΆdel numbering as a means of proving that it is impossible to have a complete model of logic.
For some reason "The following statement is true." "The previous statement is false." has always tried to send my brain into an infinite loop.