What's your favourite paradox?

hardsciencefanagain said:
Might be the following:
going back in time and killing the disoverer/inventor of time travel
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Sorry, but this is all covered in the Star Fleet Academy Temporal Mechanics class for freshers. Didn't you go to lectures at all?

Generally, things can only be discovered or invented when the other pieces needed to discover or create are already in place. The TV series Connections by science historian James Burke shown in the 1970's "demonstrated how various discoveries, scientific achievements, and historical world events were built from one another successively in an interconnected way to bring about particular aspects of modern technology." It rejected the conventional linear view of historical progress and showed that you cannot see any one thing in isolation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)

So, the inventor of Time Travel (let's call him Doctor Where) first needs someone to invent the Oscillation Overthruster. The inventor of the Oscillation Overthruster first needs someone to invent the Flux Capacitor. And the inventor of the Flux Capacitor first needs someone to invent a Sonic Screwdriver in order to make that. And the Sonic Screwdriver requires most of the world's supply of the rare mineral Handwavium. If I go back in time and murder Doctor Where before he invents time travel, the sonic screwdriver and the flux capacitor will already still exist. Which means that in another lab in another city, his rival time travel scientists, Doc What and Doc How, will still invent it at almost the same time. You see how the conditions were just perfect at that particular time for time travel to be invented, because all of the various pieces were already in place.

This leads to the feeling of a Persistence in Time, which appears to be a continuance of an effect after the cause is removed. If we were to run an experiment in several different alternative realities, and to apply an external shock (such as the death of Dr Where) to each in the series, then some shocks would have a tendency to quickly get back to its historical mean path. In other series, with low level of persistence to a shock (a mine floods in a world in which Handwavium is much rarer) would tend to persist for a long time and the series slowly drifts away from its historical mean path.

Bottom line, you canna change the laws of time. What will be, will be.
 
Dave said:
Which means that in another lab in another city, his rival time travel scientists, Doc What and Doc How, will still invent it at almost the same time.
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This is why for instance Bell Labs are credited with inventing the Transistor (1947-1948), but actually it relied on sufficiently pure Germanium. The French developed one independently unaware of Bell Labs. RCA, Westinghouse and others would have had it anyway. A Russian and others proposed workable designs in 1930s.

Increased understanding of Chemistry led to the Battery (cell) by Volta (1798, 1799 or 1800 depending who you believe), but the time was right, others would have. Telegraph, telephone, motors, electric light, radio, TV and computers inevitable.
Marconi himself (unlike Edison's spurious claims on electric light, cinema etc) told William Preece of UK GPO that he didn't invent radio, or indeed any of his apparatus. He just had discovered on the family estate (encouraged by Irish Mother) that connecting the output to a buried wire (the Earth) and suspended high wire (the Aerial) instead of the loop used in demos made a dramatic difference to range. Other people (notably Tesla) understood radio better and did quite amazing stuff. But Marconi was a successful business man.

I can't think of anything were if you killed the "inventor" that we wouldn't have had it anyway in months to a few years.
The interconnectedness and building on what is known (CIV game?) is why in fact so many inventions have multiple inventors about the same time when you go past the headlines and patents and look closely.

It's sort of creepy.
 
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I like the Limit Paradox, but then I do love Mathematics.

I think most other people would take one look at it shrug their shoulders, but it I like it because of the way it shows you reality may not be what you first think it is.
 
I had no idea i was in the presence of great thinkers in the area of spatio-temporal movement,and acausality.
I will leave this thread,suitably humbled:D
 
Not really a paradox, but a philosophical argument:

The Turing Halting Problem states that no Turing machine can reliably predict if another Turing machine will halt. The proof is really simple: If there was a program "A" that could determine if any Turing machine would halt, you could write another Turing machine "X" that would say: If program "A" says that I will halt, repeat "X" again.

This forces "A" to contradict itself (if "A" says that "X" will halt, then "X" runs forever) so this means that "A" cannot successfully predict "X"s behavior. This proof implies that it is impossible for one Turing machine to reliably predict the behavior of another arbitrary Turing machine.

There is a substantial philosophical debate about whether all conscious thought is logically equivalent to a Turing machine. (ie, can you upload your consciousness into a machine?) If this is true, then no sentient being could reliably predict the behavior of Turing machines either. However, it would also imply that no one can reliably predict the behavior of another sentient being.

Therefore, even though a Turing machine is purely deterministic so you could argue that we don't have free will, it is also logically impossible for anyone to predict how we will behave, so we are just as unpredictable as if we had free will. Is this philosophically equivalent to having free will? If a Turing machine can have "agency equivalent to free will", does that mean that a sufficiently advanced computer program has free will? Very interesting stuff.
 
Piousflea84 said:
The Turing Halting Problem states that no Turing machine can reliably predict if another Turing machine will halt.
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A) I don't know that as presented, what you have is true.
B) Programs in sequential subset of Occam programming language are mathematically provable.
Piousflea84 said:
There is a substantial philosophical debate about whether all conscious thought is logically equivalent to a Turing machine.
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I think that's overstating it. Some people allege brains are purely meat machines and some people claim what we are is purely defined by our brain.
But we don't know how a brain works
Computer Neural networks are inspired by biological neural systems, but really are nothing like them.
We don't have any sensible definition of sentient or concious or creative or intelligence, so there is hardly "a substantial philosophical debate" about it.

Yes a Turing machine is purely deterministic. But the results of a program with particular input data are not known till it's executed to completion. If it can complete (see point about Occam). Change the input data and the result is again unknown till the program is run, even though it's deterministic.

Many deterministic systems' results are unknown in advance.
 
I'm going to go with something a little more mundane:

The safer and more materially comfortable we are, the more anxious we become.
 
MWagner said:
I'm going to go with something a little more mundane:

The safer and more materially comfortable we are, the more anxious we become.
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I think it might be better said: "..., the more obnoxious we become."
 
Venusian Broon said:
I don't. Am I just too much of an optimist? Or just easily distracted by shiny things? :D
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I'm thinking collectively. We're more free from violence, discomfort, and want than our great-grandparents were. And yet we're far more anxious, and get more distressed when subjected to even the (relatively) moderate violence, discomfort, and want the average person faces today. It's the princess and the pea syndrome.

The Progress Paradox
 
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MWagner said:
I'm thinking collectively. We're more free from violence, discomfort, and want than our great-grandparents were. And yet we're far more anxious, and get more distressed when subjected to even the (relatively) moderate violence, discomfort, and want the average person faces today. It's the princess and the pea syndrome.

The Progress Paradox
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Well in all seriousness, because it's interesting to discuss...the paradox is just speculation not a truism. I mean, is such a thing really widespread amongst us all, right now?

I think if you went to a German in the midst of the thirty year war or an Englishman as the Black Death was sweeping his country in the 13th Century I think they might have good grounds to possibly disagree with the assertions of this paradox. The problem is of course that we have no way of measuring if there was more anxiousness and distress in those times compared to now. Say, how does wiping out of 1/3-1/2 of the total population compare to the distress of seeing Janet Jackson's nipple pop out during the Superbowl? How does one measure such a range? So perhaps it is pointless even trying. I'd still guess I'd be more anxious and distressed with Genghis Khan reported on the way, or the plague killing neighbours left right and centre, but it's only a guess.

Is this just the hoary old 'well, in the old days things/people were better' (in that we were tougher and complained less about the more serious things and situations we were facing in life)? Possibly not, but it has the general whiff of it :)

Personally I think 1) We have more free time 2) We like to complain 3) We fill up our free time complaining at whatever is at hand.

But then as I said I'm more of a card carrying optimist.
 
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Membership number and photo are on the other side...:D
 
Ray McCarthy said:
A) I don't know that as presented, what you have is true.
B) Programs in sequential subset of Occam programming language are mathematically provable.

I think that's overstating it. Some people allege brains are purely meat machines and some people claim what we are is purely defined by our brain.
But we don't know how a brain works
Computer Neural networks are inspired by biological neural systems, but really are nothing like them.
We don't have any sensible definition of sentient or concious or creative or intelligence, so there is hardly "a substantial philosophical debate" about it.

Yes a Turing machine is purely deterministic. But the results of a program with particular input data are not known till it's executed to completion. If it can complete (see point about Occam). Change the input data and the result is again unknown till the program is run, even though it's deterministic.

Many deterministic systems' results are unknown in advance.
Click to expand...

Okay, I mis-worded my statement; "no Turing machine can reliably predict if -any possible Turing machine, given any possible input, will halt-" There will always be subsets of Turing machines (and subsets of inputs) that are very easily predictable.

I guess my philosophical point is that, even if human behavior is biologically deterministic, our "output" may be sufficiently unpredictable that it is effectively non-deterministic. This is analogous to chaos theory, where no matter how hard you try to control the starting conditions of a chaotic process, the smallest quantum fluctuation rapidly leads to non-predictable behavior.

Philosophically speaking, is chaos the same as free will? I choose to believe that it is.

However, does that mean that any sufficiently chaotic process has some level of "consciousness"? I really don't know.
 
The time travel paradox is solved if we assume the multiple dimensions theory. If one can only travel on a single branch of time, anything you do in the past simply generates a new dimension, not affecting the future of that particular branch of time. But then if you could travel forward in time, then could you ever get back to your original timeline? What would happen if you met yourself in the future or...if you ran into your wife in the future and she turns out to be your daughter or granddaughter (depending how far into the future you went). This isn't really a paradox but I find it unreasonably fascinating...
 
Hi,

One of my faves is the non-conservation of mass if time travel is possible. Think about it. A guy goes back in time ten years - so the universe loses 80kg when he leaves and gains 80 kg ten years before.

Now say lots of people and their machines want to go back to a specific point in the past. That's people from all future times because it's such an important time and place - eg the crucifiction. That means potentially an infinite number of people arrive 2000 years ago on a hill to watch a man being crucified. All those extra kgs in the same time and place - did no one notice the singularity that occurred back then which eventually swallowed the Earth?

Cheers, Greg.
 
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