[Philosophy] Paradoxes

[Xannari Ferrows]

A while ago, I was watching a video on famous paradoxes. I was just bored and needed something to listen to, but down the line, I found myself looking up more paradoxes rather than doing what I was doing before. So it got me thinking, which as you all know, can be a dangerous thing. Why did I divert all my attention to this topic? As a matter of fact, why is anyone?

Cutting to the chase, why are we attracted to paradoxes? It's so counterintuitive. I mean, we wish to find answers to our questions. Why ask question that we can't get an answer to?

It's hard to really ask this, so here's an example: Temporal causality.

Ignoring the fact that this isn't how time actually works, we get into that infinite loop of doom. The causality paradox states that, if you went back in time to kill yourself, you could never go back in time to kill yourself, as you would be dead. Seems like a simple conclusion, right? Alright, answer found. We can go home... guys?

Even after reaching a reasonable conclusion, we still stay back to look at it. But... why? The answer is there... right? This is a bit of a paradox in itself.

Paradoxes that have no real answer are understandably interesting, but even so. Why do we pursue interest in a question that we know doesn't have a real answer? Endlessly pondering the question, and never getting closer to another side. Do we just enjoy the satisfaction of thinking about a question? Do we enjoy it because it asks for your opinion?

Speaking of which, I'd like to hear your opinion. This is a bit of a paradox in itself.

Edited July 4, 2015 by Xannari Ferrows

[Tex]

I think people like paradoxes so much because of the huuuuge scope of interpretation they can use.

If you have a wooden ship, and over time you replace one piece at a time with new parts, eventually you will have a collection of pieces of the original ship. Say you build another ship out of those pieces. Which is the original ship?

I think paradoxes are interesting, again because of the interpretation. It's an infinite loop, which means there should thusly be an infinite number of ways to look at it. Sure, the ship made out of original parts is the original ship. But wait... It was the original ship you were replacing parts on.... So THAT one's the original ship!

It's just mind-boggling, and in fact I think that boggling quality is what gives paradoxes their appeal.

[ZetaX]

Cutting to the chase, why are we attracted to paradoxes? It's so counterintuitive.

The usual usage of "paradox" suggests that this is the better definition: things we find very counterintuitive.

That one fits even those that have an actual very precise answer, e.g. Arrow's paradox or Banach-Tarski's.

From a scientific point of view, we are not trying to find paradoxes to be baffled by it, but to better our understanding of something. If time travel or quantum stuff sounds paradoxical, one maybe just doesn't understand it fully or correctly. And paradoxes allow us to see the limits of our understanding or reasoning, which then enables us to adapt and correct them.

[Xannari Ferrows]

Perhaps paradoxes are attractive, because of their tendency to make you think outside your comfort zone. You get to be in touch with your humanity directly for the duration of your thoughts.

It allows you to think outside the confines of your mind. You take in a whole different experience, and get to mold it to how you see fit.

[Ethanadams]

I like paradoxes for just something to think about forever.

(Not a paradox but same thinking principle)

whant to know haw to keep a dumb person busy? Look below

want to know haw to keep a dumb person busy? Look up

(not meant as offensive)

[Xannari Ferrows]

Want to know a most effective way to

to confuse someone?

[Ethanadams]

What? How?

[Xannari Ferrows]

Did you read the whole message?

[CaptainKipard]

The usual usage of "paradox" suggests that this is the better definition: things we find very counterintuitive.

I don't think that's the main reason. Human behaviour is very counter-intuitive, and somehow you don't see everyone clamouring to understand their own thoughts and feelings. You see this discrepancy the most in child rearing and the justice systems around the world.

[HoloYolo]

I'm morbidly curious about paradoxes. I love them. Ever ask a normal everyday person one, and watch as they find an answer? Hilarious. There's a HUGE paradox in Interstellar. Cooper says he brought himself to the tesseract. But he never went there in the first place, but his future self told him where NASA was and solved gravity. Paradox in a great movie.

[hardturkeycider]

Part of the reason it draws us is because it is seemingly unsolvable, but only within the ideas it sits upon. Remember, that in the real world, everything just works together in some seemingly seamless way that leaves us wondering, and the only way we can refer to it is using language. Language cannot possibly describe reality to completeness, so it goes to the next best thing, which is approximation. Your thoughts are also a language to describe the world. So are mathematics. So in all, paradoxes exist only in our heads. They are interesting because they are a problem to solve, and where in reality we can use Action to create Consequence, in our heads, it's all pretty much fair game as to what follows what. It's up to the individual on how to balance that.

[GluttonyReaper]

I've always assumed it's because these kind of paradoxes tend to defy what we are built for - observing a natural chain of cause and effect. It might also have something to with the kind of brain activity it produces - I assume the brain is used to dealing with situations which have some kind of an end, so to speak, at which point it can turn off and move on to the next problem. Instead, you get caught in a loop for a little bit, which I imagine is quite stimulating for the brain, as then you have to look slightly outside the loop to get an understanding of what's actually happening. I suppose it's a kind of puzzle solving, which is quite natural to enjoy.

I'm morbidly curious about paradoxes. I love them. Ever ask a normal everyday person one, and watch as they find an answer? Hilarious. There's a HUGE paradox in Interstellar. Cooper says he brought himself to the tesseract. But he never went there in the first place, but his future self told him where NASA was and solved gravity. Paradox in a great movie.

Yeah, what I like about this kind of paradox is that it's defying, again, out interpretation of things as having clear causes. Here (if I remember correctly) the information of NASA's location, if you look at things chronologically, just kind of appears towards the beginning of the movie, so he can tell himself it later, making it seem like it has no real cause at all. The fun part is that it makes logical sense if you look at any one part of the loop - how does past Cooper know where NASA is? Because future Cooper told him, obviously.

[Fel]

This... I think... may end up being more subjective than I can answer...

Of course, there's probably more things that are mistaken for paradoxes than there are paradoxes... I recall someone thinking "I always lie" was a paradox because it implied the person was lying about lying. Unfortunately "always" is a qualifier(?) that allows us to convert it to either "sometimes" or "never". "I am lying about always lying because I only sometimes lie" disproves the paradox.

We might just like them as puzzles, it might confuse us as to how easily thinking about something so simple requires our "full attention", or maybe you just like thinking in general.

Want to know a most effective way to

to confuse someone?

By wearing a tutu!

[ZetaX]

I don't think that's the main reason. Human behaviour is very counter-intuitive, and somehow you don't see everyone clamouring to understand their own thoughts and feelings. You see this discrepancy the most in child rearing and the justice systems around the world.

We understand "us" pretty well; you can somewhat guess how persons react to things if you try. I don't see what you find unintuitive at child rearing. There also are paradoxes (even named ones I think) in collective behaviour of humans.

[Fel]

Yeah, what I like about this kind of paradox is that it's defying, again, out interpretation of things as having clear causes. Here (if I remember correctly) the information of NASA's location, if you look at things chronologically, just kind of appears towards the beginning of the movie, so he can tell himself it later, making it seem like it has no real cause at all. The fun part is that it makes logical sense if you look at any one part of the loop - how does past Cooper know where NASA is? Because future Cooper told him, obviously.

This implies the single stream time-travel idea... I like recursion, the intentional warning requires a lot of deus-ex-machina to show this though.

*Also, never seen the movie so w/e*

Cooper goes back in time to warn past cooper about something, that something then causes changes in future cooper's "future" which affects future cooper's personality. Future cooper thus never goes back to warn past cooper. Future cooper gets old, real old, time travel has been around for a while and future old-cooper visits young past cooper to talk about the old days, the books had written how past young-cooper did some great event involving NASA.

Do you still have the whole "if future cooper never warned past cooper" aspect? Yes... it isn't always likely and is a fair bit deus-ex-machina but, now the loop is incidental. If bob, an old friend of cooper, never bumped into him, he would never have known about NASA.

We understand "us" pretty well; you can somewhat guess how persons react to things if you try. I don't see what you find unintuitive at child rearing. There also are paradoxes (even named ones I think) in collective behaviour of humans.

That's bordering on folk psychology (I don't think that's the right synonym). Basically, there's psychology that points to avenues of human behaviour, and there is psychology that tries to create an algorithm of human behaviour. "Traditional Wisdom" is passed down from person to person, but is ultimately flawed as it can be proven false.

We have all kinds of people trying to explain why people do what they do and no "formula" ever describes us completely. We can point to what we are likely to do, but what about the why? TV will give us utterly flat characters and give them a basic motive. I killed my wife because she cheated on me. But....In season 2, the lead detective cheated on her husband; and her husband found out... why didn't he kill her? After all, we established "cheating on wife = husband kills wife!"

So the wife cheating on him wasn't the actual motive was it? Did the guy always want to kill his wife and the cheating was just an excuse? Did the guy suffer an incident in the past that resurfaced once he found out his wife was cheating...

Humans are COMPLEX, you can never predict how someone is going to react. We can point at trends, show inconsistencies, but can never really come up with a fail proof way of saying if x then y.

Edited April 25, 2015 by Fel

[GluttonyReaper]

Do you still have the whole "if future cooper never warned past cooper" aspect? Yes... it isn't always likely and is a fair bit deus-ex-machina but, now the loop is incidental. If bob, an old friend of cooper, never bumped into him, he would never have known about NASA.

The nice thing about time travel is that because we've never seen it happen, we don't have to make any assumptions to what might happen. A single-stream is a working idea, but having a time system like you're proposing gives a much easier to understand series of events, with a much more intuitive version of events. I'm personally quite fond of the whole "forking" idea, where you have two separate timelines formed with a common history when time-travel occurs, which lets things work in this way.

Although, it's not *quite* as satisfying for some reason...

[CaptainKipard]

We understand "us" pretty well; you can somewhat guess how persons react to things if you try. I don't see what you find unintuitive at child rearing. There also are paradoxes (even named ones I think) in collective behaviour of humans.

No we don't understand "us" very well at all. One of the biggest intuitive ways in which "we" try to preclude unethical behaviour in children and the population at large is with negative reinforcement. We teach teens abstinence for example...and then watch teen pregnancies skyrocket. A similar thing happens in the justice systems where the main method for dealing with non-violent crime is punitive, and not rehabilitory. To say that we understand eachother or even ourselves is laughable. Human behaviour is very unintuitive because our common understanding of it is mostly innate and based on common sense, not logic or empiricism.

To get back to paradoxes, I don't think people in general are interested in those very much. I certainly see them discussed very rarely.

[ZetaX]

No we don't understand "us" very well at all. One of the biggest intuitive ways in which "we" try to preclude unethical behaviour in children and the population at large is with negative reinforcement. We teach teens abstinence for example...and then watch teen pregnancies skyrocket. A similar thing happens in the justice systems where the main method for dealing with non-violent crime is punitive, and not rehabilitory. To say that we understand eachother or even ourselves is laughable. Human behaviour is very unintuitive because our common understanding of it is mostly innate and based on common sense, not logic or empiricism.

You are simplifying a lot here. I did not claim it is trivial, but our lack understanding is far away from being almost nonexistent:

As an example, teaching abstinence is like teaching not to breath; sexuality is something deeply rooted in our nature as evolved beings whose predecessors needed to procreate. Look at other places than the US, Europe for example, where the standard in teaching is not abstinence but contraception; way less pregnancies there. That the US ... eds are often heavily influenced by religion, causing them to by nothing more than a version of "don't do it, it is evil".

Similiar arguments work for your other examples. As I said, you just oversimplify and then claim we don't understand this at all; we actually understand it quite a bit.

[Fel]

As an example, teaching abstinence is like teaching not to breath; sexuality is something deeply rooted in our nature as evolved beings whose predecessors needed to procreate. Look at other places than the US, Europe for example, where the standard in teaching is not abstinence but contraception; way less pregnancies there.

Again, we're drastically oversimplifying here. (Also, I hate this form of argument so...)

There is zero control in your "study," you find an association and point to a conclusion; similar to Al Gore and an Inconvenient Truth. "The USA is the number one producer of CO2, we also have the most unwanted pregnancies, Europe has lower CO2 emissions and has unwanted pregnancies; therefore lowering CO2 emissions will reduce teen pregnancy."

We have studies, we perform experiments... but we have NEVER been able to adequately model the human mind such that we know how people will respond. Folk Psychology relies on confirmation biases, it relies on you being able to point at something and say "I've always believed CO2 was tied to teen pregnancy, now I can prove it"; it relies on you ignoring the inconsistencies, it relies on you ignoring how big the system is, how many variables contribute to it.

[ZetaX]

You are missing the point: a hypothesis thats involves a mechanic to explain how something happens (here: evolutionary based psychological reasons) is way more specific than a simple correlation. This is one of the accepted ways to distinguish causality from correlation.

Additionally, I was only explaining there why the given statements are not contradicting what I said earlier. In this case because the initial argument had the same inadequacy you gave: only looking at correlations (which may be random, as the CO2 one likely is) instead of causalities.

Surely we cannot model human minds at the level of us being able to fully predict what someone says. But similiarily, you could rightfully claim that we were never able to predict how 1000000 of atoms in a plasma will behave (even less a m³ of air); it's not that we are truly lacking the skill, we are just lacking computational power, data and time. It is not a fundamental problem/paradox where we don't know how to deal with it.

[Fel]

You are missing the point: a hypothesis thats involves a mechanic to explain how something happens (here: evolutionary based psychological reasons) is way more specific than a simple correlation. This is one of the accepted ways to distinguish causality from correlation.

It is deceptive in that it makes it APPEAR you have an argument, but not specific.

I have two containers of clear liquid, I mix the contents of these two containers. The result is a blue liquid. I conclude that I MAY have copper II sulfate, or I may have thymolphthalein and a base... but because I am biased to copper II sulfate, I decide, with no rational testing, that it must be copper II sulfate. There's no control here, I simply pointed out facts and came to a random conclusion, the water may be blue simply because there was food colouring in the container I mixed it in! You're trying to imply that you have hidden knowledge understanding the causation because you can point at things and say "Look, that correlation fits my hypothesis!" (which I mentioned as Confirmation Bias).

Randomly assigning a causation "CO2 causes hypoxia which lowers brain functioning which can, in turn, lower inhibitions" doesn't mean the causation is true. It doesn't matter how well argued you make that causation because, ultimately, it is based off of correlation. You see what you want to believe and thus it becomes true.

it's not that we are truly lacking the skill, we are just lacking computational power, data and time.

How do we lack computational power? If we want to use the inadequate models we have to calculated the prediction over time, we can... we'll then run our fusion test, see that the models need adjustment, run our simulations, and do it again. Not everything needs to take only 30 seconds or even a week, especially if the SIMULATION matters far more than just a game.

Understanding of Plasma Physics is EXPANDING, we haven't learned everything there is to know about the universe and what it is made up of, we've barely scratched the surface.

[ZetaX]

You again did not get the point. We could probably simulate that plasma very well if we would have 10^100 times our computative power and the initial data while still only using our current knowledge of the laws of nature. Again: this simulation is not a conceptual or fundamental problem. We very obviously are not even close to such computative power (thus we still do plasma physics). But there is in theory nothing stopping us to simulate plasma at very high accuracy right now only using our current level of physics; it would be a waste of time and ressources to so, but very theoretically we could.

Also, the argument for causality is supposed to be testable and then to be tested. It feels very tedious arguing this because every time I do not even repeat the most basic things of science (like testability) I get such response. Guys, try to understand the argument instead of attempting to debunk things for such reasons.

Edited April 25, 2015 by ZetaX

[Ethanadams]

Here is a good one

if a tree falls and nothing is around to hear it does it make a sound?

[CaptainKipard]

Here is a good one

if a tree falls and nothing is around to hear it does it make a sound?

That's not a paradox. A paradox is a self contradictory statement or circumstance. This has a clear answer and it's "no". "Sound" is an abstract concept. Air vibrations are not.

[windows_x_seven]

Here, I know one:

The sentence below (the underscored one)is true or false:

"This sentence is false".