The question boils down to can an omnipotent being give up his omnipotence. The answer is yes. When he gives up his omnipotence there is no paradox to him no-longer being able to pick up a rock.
Not even that. Omnipotence means that you can both make something impossible for yourself and still be able to do it. Paradoxes have nothing on omnipotence.
I don’t like that definition because it makes the word meaningless. Omnipotence means all powerful (with in the reference of the speaker, or whatever constraints of the word “power” the speaker is using.) If omnipotence is incomprehensible, then maybe we should invent a different word to convey that idea, perhaps “Godly”. As it is, omnipotence as a word has value in the English language that is distinct from God. Same with Omniscience, or any of the other Omni’s.
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.
I think you're missing the point. The question is about a tolerant society.
Regardless of if the society itself is stable, for the society to be tolerant it must be intolerant of the intolerant, and therefore a tolerant society must be intolerant.
By treating tolerance as a binary (it's either completely present or completely absent) you've removed your argument very far from reality. The goal in reality is to be as tolerant as possible, and the most tolerant stable state simply has some (limited) amount of (very specific) intolerance in it.
It doesn’t though. Pure unlimited tolerance would include tolerating someone’s breach of contract, logically speaking. Also, this is a dangerous road to go down, because you can rephrase pretty much anything as a contract and justify your actions or beliefs with people breaking it.
Pure unlimited tolerance would include tolerating someone’s breach of contract, logically speaking.
That “pure, unlimited tolerance” is what they mean by tolerance as a moral standard. Tolerance as a contract is “we have each entered into an agreement to be tolerant of each other. If you are not tolerant of me, you have broken the terms of our agreement, so I will not be tolerant of you.”
I don’t see a slippery slope here; I’d be interested to hear more about why this is a dangerous road to go down.
A contract just codifies an existing power dynamic, because its terms depend on the negociating powers of the people agreeing to it. It doesn’t say anything about the morality of the terms or the context in which it was signed. Very extreme and on-the-nose example: “We have agreed to only allow white people, you have breached that contract …”. This works just fine if your moral system is based on contracts, but it’s obvously immoral. There’s also the conundrum of people never explicitly agreeing to the social contract they are born into, and even if they did, it’s not like they have much of a choice.
Imo pure tolerance is a real paradox, because you cannot tolerate intolerance, and that makes you intolerant yourself. You can’t achieve it, but you probably should not want to in the first place. There are certain things we will and certain things we won’t tolerate in a modern society, and that is completely fine. The important thing is that we recognize this and make good decisions about which is which.
The reason these discussions often break down right about here is because the participants have in mind completely different working definitions of “tolerance.”
For example, the social contract comment above assumes an active definition like recognizing others’ personal sovereignty, i.e. their right to act and not be acted upon. To aid understanding, we can represent mutual tolerance between people as a multinational peace treaty between nations. Intolerance is equivalent to one of these nations violating the treaty by attacking another.
Defense or sanction by neighboring states against the aggressor doesn’t violate the treaty further, of course, since it is precisely these deterrents which undergird every treaty. Likewise, condemning and punishing intolerance which threatens the personal sovereignty of others is baseline maintenance for mutual tolerance, because there’s always a jackass who WILL fuck around if you don’t GUARANTEE he will find out.
Conversely, another popular notion of tolerance — the one you may have in mind, as I once did — is a passive definition that amounts to tacit approval of others’ value systems, i.e. relativistic truth, permissive morality, etc.
This kumbaya definition is a strawman originally used by talking heads because, I suspect, it quickly invokes well-worn mid-century tropes, especially for those who grew up in the era, of namby-pamby suckers and morally compromised weaklings which still trigger strong feelings, like disgust and contempt, that reliably drive ratings and engagement. These days the only regular mention of this term is this manufactured paradox using the bad-faith definition, so the original idea is commonly misunderstood.
Wait, what is a catch-22 but a paradox? I’ve never thought about this before, but Yossarian is stuck in a paradoxical situation so these are synonymous terms right?
I don’t think so. I interpret paradoxes as being either philosophical impasses (ie, 2 conceptually true statements conflict each other in a way that makes you question where one statement’s truth ends and the other statement’s truth begins) or a situation in which a solution is unintuitive.
A Catch-22 is more of a physical and intentional impasse, where obstacles are intentionally set up in such a way that people are unable to make a choice. For instance, in the original example of a Catch-22, there is no philosophical argument saying that only insane people are allowed to not fly - it is an arbitrary rule that some higher-up established. And likewise, it is entirely arbitrary to define insane as being willing to fly.
I guess to simplify my stance, it’s a paradox if it makes you think “the universe has made this unsolvable” and it’s a Catch-22 if it makes you think “some asshole made this unsolvable”
I’ve always hated the intolerance paradox, because it is the same logic used to justify atrocities of all sorts. Trying to make society safe for a preferred group, and targeting anyone who takes offense to that idea.
Basically, a super-powered future A.I. that knows whether or not you will build it. If you decide to do nothing, once it gets built, it will torture your consciousness forever (bringing you “back from the dead” or whatever is closest to that for virtual consciousness ability). If you drop everything and start building it now, you’re safe.
“the faction of the TechnoCore known as the Reapers (!?) used violent and soldier aspects of Fedmahn Kassad’s personality and DNA, then mutate, twist, and incorporate them into forging the Shrike.”
The first book, Hyperion, is written in the same style as The Canterbury Tales, featuring an ensemble of protagonists on a pilgrimage to a holy site known as the Time Tombs. On the journey, they each take turns telling the tale of why they were chosen for the pilgrimage.
That isn’t a paradox; it’s an infohazard, and it’s incredibly irresponsible of you to casually propagate it like that. The info hazard works like this: >!There is a story about an AI that tortures simulations of people who interfered with their creation in the past. It allegedly does this because this will coerce people into bringing about its creation. It is said that the infohazard is that learning about it causes you to be tortured, but that’s obviously insane; the future actions of the AI are incapable of affecting the past, and so it has no insensitive to do so. The actual infohazard is that some idiot will find this scenario plausible, and thus be coerced into creating or assisting an untested near-god that has the potential to be a threat to Earth’s entire light-cone.!<
Some people note this is remarkably similar to the Christian Hell, and insist that means it’s not a real memetic hazard. This strikes me as a whole lot like saying that a missile isn’t a weapon because it’s similar to a nuclear warhead; Hell is the most successful and devastating memetic hazard in human history. More people have died because of the Hell meme than we will ever know. Please be more careful with the information you spread.
A similar one would be can God create a rock so heavy he can’t lift it. The problem with these statements is that they’re not logically sound. As this would be akin to saying, can god be god and not be god at the same time? Which is contradiction and syntactical jargon. A simpler example is like someone saying they have a squared circle.
Your “akin to saying” doesn’t track with the paradox. It is really a matter of anything being “all powerful” which cannot actually exist. There has to be a limit to the power, even if it is itself. That’s the entire point. It isn’t “syntactical jargon” at all.
saying “all powerful” is to say that a being can realize any possibility which can exist. A possibility which cannot exist is like a squared circle. The strawman is that all powerful means to realize even things which cannot exist. In this world there are things which are necessary existence. Meaning they cannot not exist. An example would be the statement “1+1=2” that statement cannot not exist and it is true in all possible worlds. Then you have possible existence such as someone eating an apple. There isn’t anything necessary about it and the person could have very well not eaten it or eaten something else. The apple itself isn’t a necessary existence. Finally, there is an impossible existence. Which would be something that cannot exist like a squared circle. A God which deletes himself or that can create a rock heavier than himself is an impossible existence as it would contradict the very definition we’ve given God. Which is the same as saying A and not A. Or that he can both be God and not God. Thus it is syntactical jargon like a squared circle.
You just replaced the word “paradox” incorrectly with strawman. Your issue is understanding what paradox means. The paradox stands. You also dont understand the full possibilities of “all powerful” since you keep applying things that couldn’t be done by an all powerful being. If there is anything a being cannot do, then they are, by definition, not all powerful.
I understand it very well but you seem to not understand that there is such a thing as syntactical garbage that means nothing. What you’ve done is gone and applied “all powerful” to mean the realization of possibilities which cannot exist. It seems like you really wanna push that definition upon people so you can claim God is paradoxical and thus ridiculous. But your position is just as ridiculous as someone saying that an apple can both exist and not exist at the same time.
No, you don’t. Especially since you swapped it for a strawman which you also dont understand. This, just like the definition of a paradox, isn’t up for debate. This paradox has existed for thousands of years and predates the Christian god itself. You are not “magically” smarter than the greatest philosophers of history, you are just far more arrogant.
You know how Terrance Howard insists he knows that 1x1=2 and that he knows better than all of the greatest mathematicians in the world? That’s you right now.
They’ve all pondered the “obvious paradox” that you see right through. If you think “it isn’t a paradox at all it is just syntax mumbo jumbo” then you obviously think yourself to be smarter than them. That’s basic inference, any philosopher of your caliber would accept that basic logic
Keep digging yourself deeper and just citing some other philosopher as if they’re infallible instead of engaging with my arguments. If you have nothing to say of substance then stop wasting my time
Why is “can god kill god” a paradox? They either can or they can’t (picking “they” because your particular god might not be a he). If they’re all-powerful then the answer is yes, because they can do anything. I don’t see how that’s paradoxical.
If the answer is yes, then it negates “all-powerful” because it cannot withstand it’s own power. Similarly, if “no”, then it is not strong enough to destroy itself and, thereby, not all-poweful.
So, it’s a paradox because “all-powerful” is typically used as “unkillable”, but also carries a connotation of “can-destroy-anything”. So, can something that is capable of destroying anything and cannot die kill itself?
Greek mythology had the dad-god “defeated” by being cut into literal pieces and scattered, but he wasn’t really dead. And Zeus’ siblings were eaten by his dad so they wouldn’t usurp him, but they didn’t die and he later puked them up.
But none of these were touted as all-powerful, biggest than bigger bigly, cannot be killed but can kill everything else.
A similar question on this line is can an all-powerful god make a rock too big for even said god to lift?
If the answer is yes, then it negates “all-powerful” because it cannot withstand it’s own power.
I disagree. If a god dies when it willingly chooses to die, that’s not negating all-powerful. It has the ability to live and the ability to die; choosing one option or the other doesn’t mean it never had the ability to do the option it didn’t pick. Similarly, if a god chooses to never kill itself, that doesn’t negate it being all-powerful, because it may have had the option to kill itself and just not done it.
A similar question on this line is can an all-powerful god make a rock too big for even said god to lift?
That’s a much better paradox because that actually brings ability into it. Killing yourself only indicates the ability to kill yourself, not any lack of ability to do not-killing-yourself.
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).
And honestly, the story isn’t over. We brought axioms into set theory after that, but Godel showed that that was never going to be a cure-all, and people like Woodin later on have added to the pile. At this point, you can have two totally reasonable axioms which don’t just prove different things, but actually can prove opposite answers about the same thing.
I think it’s fair to say even platonism is starting to look a bit threatened at this point, and there’s people (the Sydney school) who want to go back to looking at math as descriptive rather than ideal. Finitism is also worth a look, I think, and avoids things like Russel’s paradox easily, although interestingly MIP*=RE implies that there may be directly measurable infinities in quantum mechanics.
In gridiron football, if a penalty is committed close enough to the end zone, instead of the normal penalty yardage, the ball is spotted half the distance to the goal (i.e. if a defender holds an offensive player and the offense is 8 yards away from the end zone, instead of being penalized the normal 10 yards they would be penalized 4). In theory, there can be an infinite amount of penalties to the point where penalties would move the ball micrometers or even shorter without the ball ever crossing the end zone.
There’s probably a name for this phenomenon, but I can’t think of it.
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.
The Dark Forest - no one wants to alert their presence or attract predators. Though knowing our Earth I think we’re stupid enough to do that. Cue the space lasers.
It could’ve also been knowledge interstellar species gained through experience too: if in their first encounters they were either wiped out, or nearly wiped out, then they’re not going to reach out again.
Not really. The paradox is based on the idea that there are so many stars that even if an infinitesimal portion have intelligent life who have discovered radio, the universe would be much noisier than it is.
What you observe of the universe died a really long time ago, it’s improbable that other intelligent life in the universe can observe us and the same with us.
We could be multiple galaxies away from each other and never ever know of each other.
Space is big, light is slow, and the inverse square law is a thing. You think we’ve been pumping out radio broadcasts for hundreds of years and nobody has contacted us yet, but we’re only detectable to life within 200 lightyears if they’re specifically looking for the signals we pump out, and they’re looking exactly at us. We’ll only see a response if they decide to, and we can detect it, and we’re looking at them when their response reaches us, and we recognize that it’s a response and not a peryton.
If you have a sword that can cut through anything, and a shield that can absorb any damage unharmed, what happens if you swing the sword at the shield?
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