Weird attribution, man :) That one, and a lot of others like it, come all the way from the 12th Century and thereabouts. Carlin’s influence is awesome and deserved, but I don’t think it stretches that far :)
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.
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.
This could be assuming there’s only one timeline we’re currently inhabiting. There could be nested meta times or spacetimes encompassing the universe, leaving us in a series of overlapping Nows. Or maybe the forward passage of time and causality end up only being true locally, and in other places in the cosmos time can run in loops or backwards or not at all. In that case Now could mean different things to different observers depending where and when you are.
If Now exists outside of time, then the measurement of time weather it’s measured as a loop, forward, backward, in a spiral, etc. would have no effect on the Now. From the Now’s perspective all of time has already occurred, is occurring, and has yet to occur all at once. If Now’s position is fixed, then it would appear in multiple timelines at once, and in multiple locations at once.
Time is simply a measurement of the constant of change, which is itself a paradox, something false that continuously proves itself to be false, or something in motion that continuously keeps itself in motion. So we can say something that is false is something that is mutable and movable. Then an object that is not false, outside of the constant of change, would be immutable, in-movable, and fixed, like the Now. Time would move around it, while it remains stationary and unaffected.
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.
I had success talking about the tortoise one with imaginary time stamps.
I think it gets more understandable that this pseudo paradox just uses smaller and smaller steps for no real reason.
If you just go one second at a time you can clearly see exactly when the tortoise gets overtaken.
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: www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZOi9HH5ueU
If I remember my series analysis math classes correctly: technically, summing a decreasing trend up to infinity will give you a finite value if and only if the trend decreases faster than the function/curve x -> 1/x.
Great. Can you give me example of decreasing trend slower than that function curve?, where summation doesn’t give finite value? A simple example please, I am not math scholar.
So, for starters, any exponentiation “greater than 1” is a valid candidate, in the sense that 1/(n^2), 1/(n^3), etc will all give a finite sum over infinite values of n.
From that, inverting the exponentiation “rule” gives us the “simple” examples you are looking for: 1/√n, 1/√(√n), etc.
Knowing that √n = n^(1/2), and so that 1/√n can be written as 1/(n^(1/2)), might help make these examples more obvious.
Turns out the resolution to that paradox is that our universe is quantized, which means there’s a minimum “step” that once you reach will probabilistically round up or down to the nearest step. It’s kind of like how Super Mario at extreme float values will snap to a grid.
Wait, isn’t space and time infinitely divisible? (I’m assuming you’re referencing quantum mechanics, which I don’t understand, and so I’m genuinely asking.)
Disclaimer: not a physicist, and I never went beyond the equivalent to a BA in physics in my formal education (after that I “fell” into comp sci, which funnily enough I find was a great pepper for wrapping my head around quantum mechanics).
So space and time per se might be continuous, but the energy levels of the various fields that inhabit spacetime are not.
And since, to the best of our current understanding, everything “inside” the universe is made up of those different fields, including our eyes and any instrument we might use to measure, there is a limit below which we just can’t “see” more detail - be it in terms of size, mass, energy, spin, electrical potential, etc.
This limit varies depending on the physical quantity you are considering, and are collectively called Planck units.
Note that this is a hand wavy explanation I’m giving that attempts to give you a feeling for what the implications of quantum mechanics are like. The wikipédia article I linked in the previous paragraph gives a more precise definition, notably that the Planck “scale” for a physical quantity (mass, length, charge, etc) is the scale at which you cannot reasonably ignore the effects of quantum gravity. Sadly (for the purpose of providing you with a good explanation) we still don’t know exactly how to take quantum gravity into account. So the Planck scale is effectively the “minimum size limit” beyond which you kinda have to throw your existing understanding of physics out of the window.
This is why I began this comment with “space and time might be continuous per se”; we just don’t conclusively know yet what “really” goes on as you keep on considering smaller and smaller subdivisions.
The paradox holds in an infinitely dividable setting. Take the series of numbers where the next number equals the previous one divided by 2: {1, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16…}. If you take the sum of this infinite series (there is always a larger factor of two to divide by) you are going to get a finite result (namely 2, in this instance). So for the real life example, while there is always another ‘half’ of the distance to be travelled, the time it takes to do so is also halved with every iteration.
Zeno’s Paradox, even though it’s pretty much resolved
Lol. It pretty much just decreases the time span you look at so that you never get to the point in time the arrow reaches the apple. Nothing there to be “solved” IMHO
Mine is similar to yours in that it’s about the power of God. It’s called the Epicurean Trilemma:
If a god is omniscient and omnipotent, then they have knowledge of all evil and have the power to put an end to it. But if they do not end it, they are not omnibenevolent.
If a god is omnipotent and omnibenevolent, then they have the power to extinguish evil and want to extinguish it. But if they do not do it, their knowledge of evil is limited, so they are not omniscient.
If a god is omniscient and omnibenevolent, then they know of all the evil that exists and wants to change it. But if they do not, which must be because they are not capable of changing it, so they are not omnipotent.
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.
A simple way I’ve been touching on this for a while is what I call “The problem of existence”: why would god create a non-divine existence such as our selves?
Put aside evil. If God is all three omnis, why make something that is lesser? I figure that the answer is they themselves must also be lesser than the three omnis.
The Christian explanation for this is that god doesn’t do evil, people do.
And god created people with free will to do evil. If he made people stop doing evil deeds, they would be his puppets, not free-willed humans. So he has the power to end all evil but chooses not to.
Now as for why god allows natural disasters, diseases and other tragedies to befall his creation – again, that’s just the consequence of our actions, cause a woman gave an apple to her man in the past.
It’s worse than that. It’s “believe that you must do as I say, despite my complete refusal to create worthwhile evidence of my existence, and then do what I say” or “suffer for all eternity”.
Frankly, I don’t buy this as an explanation even for human-created evil. It is still evidence that god cannot be tri-omni. Because it is still a situation in which god is able to remove evil and is aware of the evil, and yet he chooses to permit evil. Even evil done by one human against another, when the other is entirely innocent. And that cannot be omnibenevolent.
From how you phrased it I suspect you agree with me here, but the natural disasters argument is even more ludicrous. It doesn’t even come close to working as a refutation of the Epicurian Trilemma.
The Christian explanation for this is that god doesn’t do evil, people do.
And god created people with free will to do evil. If he made people stop doing evil deeds, they would be his puppets, not free-willed humans.
I never understood this argument. If he’s all-powerful, he would have the ability to eliminate all evil without affecting free will.
The Christian god created every aspect of the universe and how it works. He therefore could have created a universe in which there was no such thing as evil or suffering, and given people in that universe free will. So even that doesn’t hold up.
I think that’s their point; they’re saying that’s what God did. He “created a universe in which there was no such thing as evil or suffering and [gave] people in that universe free will.”
And humans screwed it up.
I’m not saying that, mind you. I’m saying I think you just agreed with the person you’re debating as a proof that they were wrong.
It doesn’t matter what you tack on, it doesn’t change my point — the only way humans could “screw it up” is if God made all the negative and horrible shit part of the universe. All you are saying is that God made a universe where there was no evil or suffering actively happening, but the concepts existed and were possible — because they ultimately happened and only possible things happen. And God chose to make them possible things as omnipotent creator of everything that exists.
Wait, so this God gives me true free will, and then places me in a world where I can’t change anything? Everything is fixed, immovable? Or where I only have “good” choices available? Is that what you think God should have done? Like, how does your version even work?
Or does God give us fake free will, and keep our minds from thinking “bad” thoughts?
If I’m free, I can screw up. Otherwise, I’m not free.
No. You aren’t getting it. The Christian god created every aspect of the universe. Light and dark. Up and down. You are still thinking about our universe, in which these negative things are possible, and how you would have to be restricted in what you do in our universe in order to prevent you from doing certain things. But god could have set all the parameters of the universe differently such that they just didn’t exist at all. You wouldn’t miss them or be prevented from doing them. It would be like if there were a fifth cardinal direction in an alternate universe, and someone in that universe thought “if god prevented me from going in that direction, I wouldn’t have free will anymore”. But here we are, with only four cardinal directions, and free will. We aren’t being stopped from doing anything, it just isn’t part of our universe and doesn’t even make sense in it.
I think I get what you’re saying but it is a little bit beyond me.
I still wonder if the problem doesn’t come down to Free Will itself. Regardless of what universe one is living in, if you have only two people in it and they each have free will at some point the free will of one is going to intrude on the free will of the other, and they’re going to require some kind of negotiation or polite accommodation. Some kind of social interaction.
And if one doesn’t take this action but instead proceeds with one’s free will regardless of the other’s free will there is a problem that is inevitably going to exist no matter what universe exists.
How can you kill a god? What a grand and intoxicating innocence! How could you be so naive? There is no escape. No Recall or Intervention can work in this place. Come. Lay down your weapons. It is not too late for my mercy!
If God exists, and God is a non material, intangible being, then God exists outside of the material world. Objects bound to the material universe are born and in turn die, they have a lifespan. If God does not exist within the material universe, then God was never born, therefore God cannot die. God, if they exist, world have no material or tangible properties that can degrade. Also, if God exists outside of the material universe, then God is not bound to the constant of change, and would then be an immutable, un-movable, fixed object, and since death is dependent on mutability, then God could not change their state of existence, as they would be immutable.
I agree with the classical interpretation of an infinitely perfect immaterial God outside of time. But the way out of the paradox is to scrutinize the question itself.
To illustrate the point, take three paradoxical questions: 1) Can God kill himself?, 2) Can God create a stone that he can’t lift?, 3) Can God create a square circle?
#3 Is obviously a meaningless question. The words individually have meaning, but the “square circle” refers to an impossible object whose properties are self-contradictory. Because we interpret God’s power as the ability to do all logically possible things, the inability to create this self-contradictory object is not a limit on his power.
#2 Seems better on the surface because we can posit increasingly larger stones. But the contradiction here is between the object and the nature of God. Once we accept an infinitely perfect God, there can, by definition, be nothing greater than it. If there was a stone that God couldn’t lift, this would contradict the fact of God’s existence. Therefore, as we are under the assumption that God exists, the object itself must be impossible.
#1 Is another form of the omnipotence paradox in #2. Can God do something that contradicts his own properties? This would make God immutable/eternal and yet not immutable/eternal. But an infinitely perfect God is, by definition, immutable/eternal! So any action that would contradict himself is a contradiction in terms and thereby logically impossible. Just like in the case of #3, the answer to the question isn’t “no”. Rather, the question itself is nonsensical.
It’s only nonsensical if you have the additional assumption that God cannot do things that are logically impossible. Granted, if they can, that kind of throws all logical explorations of this sort out the window.
Agreed. And if God can do things outside of logic/reason, then we can’t understand him. Then the answer to the paradox would be: it is both impossible and possible. Which doesn’t make sense, but now we’re supposing God doesn’t follow the law of non-contradiction.
You’re right it’s not a paradox but rather it is a statement that is self-contradictory or logically untenable, though based on a valid deduction from acceptable premises.
For #1 "Can God kill Himself.?"This presumes God is a physical and material being. If God is a non material being, not consisting of matter, then God was never born, as no material substance was brought into being, therefore God cannot die. So the answer would be no, because God was never born.
For #2 “Can God create a stone he cannot lift?” No. If God is a non material being, that creates the potential for material objects, then God would presumably create the potential of the material stone, and then the potential for a material being, that God could then animate through consciousness. God would then be both a non material being, and a material being in which he animates, that has the potential to lift the stone. Now if you belive that every material object has consciousness, then God would be the being lifting the stone, and the stone itself, so in essence God would be lifting Himself.
For #3 “Can God create a square circle?” Yes. God is a non material being that creates the potential for material objects, form and shape. The measurement of these shapes are arbitrary, measured by material beings, of form and shape. The circle and the square are the same object, a shape, only differentiated by a distribution of points, where one object can configure itself to be the same shape as the other object, by redistributing each objects respective points. So can God create the potential of a shape that can reconfigure itself into another shape, Yes.
Think of it like this, say you have a group of nanobots that are positioned in such a way that they form a shape that we label a circle. Then those nanobots reposition themselves into a shape, that we label as a square. Now did those nanobots create 2 different shapes, or a single shape that reconfigures itself? If it’s just a shape that reconfigured itself, then the shape is neither a square nor a circle, it’s just simply a shape, that is arbitrarily measured, whose measurement does not change the fact that what is being measured is still just a shape.
Can God kill Himself.?" This presumes God is a physical and material being.
I’m afraid I don’t see why being non-physical entails being eternal. For example, couldn’t God create an angel and then destroy it later? If angels are non-physical beings that can be created and destroyed, then immateriality doesn’t entail eternality. Moreover, you’re right that God cannot die, but it doesn’t follow that the answer to question #1 is “no”. If there was something that God couldn’t do, then God wouldn’t be omnipotent. So the question asks can God commit a logically contradictory action.
God would then be both a non material being, and a material being in which he animates, that has the potential to lift the stone. Now if you belive that every material object has consciousness…
I think our starting assumptions are somewhat far apart.
Creation and destruction are bound to the material world. If God created an angel, what matter, aside from God, would be created? If no matter is created then there is no matter to destroy. If God creates an angel from what material would God create it from? God is non material. The angel would just be an expression of God, just as a wave of the sea is just an expression of the entire sea itself, the wave is the sea, and an expression of the sea. The angel would also be just an expression of God. God would not create nor destroy anything, God would just be reconfiguring itself.
God is capable of being omnipotent and commit a logically contradictory action. If God is a perfect being, and thus can only create perfect things, and then God decided to create an imperfect object, then that object would be perfectly imperfect, like the beings that are asking the logically contradictory question: Can God kill Himself? Circular logic is in itself, complete.
The specific example doesn’t matter much. Google “category error” or read the comment below where I explain the response in more detail.
You don’t strike me as someone I want to interact with.
It’s not like I’m trolling. This stuff is philosophy of religion 101. But, you are, of course, always free to ignore information that contradicts your world view.
This stuff is not philosophy of religion 101, though it might be one seminary professor’s lesson notes in systematic theology for christianity. Specific religions will typically have mental gymnastics or say things like, “It’s just too complicated to understand with our limited capacity as mortals.”
Given a being exists outside of this reality, the laws of this reality do not apply to it. And given a being created this reality, that being can do whatever it wants, regardless of this reality and it’s laws. So the paradox still stands.
Given a being exists outside of this reality, the laws of this reality do not apply to it.
When we assume a contradiction is true (e.g., God is immutable and God is not immutable: P ^ -P), then we can derive any proposition and it’s negation from that contradiction.
P ∧ -P
P (1)
-P (1)
P ∨ X (2)
X (3, 4)
P ∨ -X (2)
-X (3, 6)
If God can make a contradiction true, then every other proposition whatsoever can be proven true and false at the same time. We can infer the following: 1) All questions about God are useless because God is now beyond reason/logic and 2) Reason itself would lose all applicability as logic, necessity, mathematics, etc. can no longer be taken for granted. These seem like untenable consequences. We have, however, an alternate conception of God’s omnipotence that doesn’t force us to abandon reason/logic.
There are different logics that account for temporality, modality (e.g., necessity), degrees of true, etc. But I doubt there’s any logic we could construct that can account for the inconceivable and the impossible being possible. Human reason throws up its hands and sits in the corner.
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.
Newcomb’s paradox is my favourite. You have two boxes in front of you. Box B contains $1000. You can either pick box A only, or both boxes A and B. Sounds simple, right? No matter what's in box A, picking both will always net you $1000 more, so why would anyone pick only box A?
The twist is that there's a predictor in play. If the predictor predicted that you would pick only box A, it will have put $1,000,000 in box A. If it predicted that you would pick both, it will have left box A empty. You don't know how the predictor works, but you know that so far it has been 100% accurate with everyone else who took the test before you.
That’s what I’ve read so far. I mean, I’ve never heard of the predictor being human. Usually it’s described as a super computer or some other “being”. I e. No one that cares about your feelings or about being compensated 😂
To some people the answer is obviously box A — you get $1,000,000 because the predictor is perfect. To others, the answer is obviously to pick both, because no matter what the predictor said, it's already done and your decision can't change the past, so picking both boxes will always net you $1000 more than picking just one. Neither argument has any obvious flaw. That's the paradox.
It's only the one-boxers who describe the predictor as “perfect”, presumably interpolating from the observation that the predictor has always been right so far. Two-boxers might argue that you have no idea if the predictor is perfect or whether they've just been incredibly lucky so far, but also, they will argue that this is irrelevant because the boxes have already been set up and your choice cannot change it anymore.
Assuming time travel exists: is it possible to alter the past?
If an event occurs, and you decide to travel back in time to change/prevent that event: It has no longer occurred in the way that caused you to want to change it; thus you never travel back to change it, and it does occur…
Perhaps. Unless you consider multiverse theory: The idea that the act of traveling to the past splits the timeline into two realities. One containing the original (to your perspective) timeline with the event(s) that caused you to travel back, and a second where you’ve arrived in the past to alter those events and the results there of.
Not sure I believe it, but it’s a theory none the less.
Or maybe it’s only possible to travel forward in time. Closer to our current understanding of the universe.
The multiverse conception of time travel is nice and fine for fiction, but in reality, if you think about what such a time machine would have to do, it would have to create an entire new universe, with all precise details exactly in place, and it would have to have a lower entropy than your origin reality. Good luck building such a machine
I like the idea of splitting timelines if reverse time travel is possible, but it does have some consequences. The biggest one being that it means you can’t actually travel back in time. Time travel may even be relatively simple but as it has no effect on the primary timeline you will never be able to change the past as it appears there; travelling back in time simply creates an alternate reality. As far as the primary timeline inhabitants are concerned, you have either died or vanished (or maybe nothing appeared to happen at all) but you have not travelled in time. It also means it’s impossible to return to your original timeline as further reverse time travel will only create new alternate timelines, the closest you can get is a timeline that closely resembles your home one.
Another fun approach is that infinitely many alternate timelines already exist (think Many Worlds), travelling back in time simply means you spontaneously form in another world through quantum fluctuations or something equally hand-wavey. The thing I find interesting about this one is that it doesn’t necessarily involve time travel at all. You form with the memories of having travelled in time, sure, but you have just spontaneously formed through quantum fluctuations so it’s reasonable to assume your memories have too; it may have just been a randomly formed memory that didn’t actually happen. Since it’s just random fluctuations there’d also be infinitely many universes where you spontaneously pop into existence with no time travel memory, so I suppose in a way this never was time travel. The original timeline would be unaffected by this kind of travel as you can only move to universes where you have already spawned in.
The way I see it the only way to actually change the past in your current timeline arguably involves destroying the universe. You’d have a single timeline and each instance of reverse time travel cuts off your timeline’s future and links back to a previous point from which time can continue. You can visualise this timeline as a piece of string, time travel is a loop in that string. If you travel back in time by a year, everything you did in that past year is within that loop off to the side of the primary timeline; the loop starts and ends at the same point. Time travel would essentially delete your future and plonk you back onto the primary timeline. No need to worry about the grandfather paradox; you were born in a loop off to the side of real time so killing your grandfather doesn’t change that loop. It works around the bootstrap paradox for similar reasons; the information was created in some loop somewhere, even if it appears to have created itself on the prime line. It’s a nice thought experiment but the problem here is that if you travel back in time but fail to change the conditions which caused the time travel you may have just ended the universe in an infinite time loop.
I was playing with this recently. Suppose you are playing rock, paper, scissors with yourself from a few minutes into the future. Your future self “remembers” what you will play and so as long as you play normally, future self always wins. But change the rules a bit and play where future you goes first.
In a normal game, you should always win because you clearly see how future you played, but future you played to counter what future you remembers present you playing…
E.g. future you remembers playing paper, and so plays scissors. You see scissors and go go play rock, but that should be impossible because future you doesn’t remember playing rock.
The weird thing to me is not that the second scenario (where future you goes first fails) but that playing normally (both going at the same time) works. I think the paradox emerges when future knowledge is introduced to the past. In the normal game, future you does not expose future knowledge until the exact moment you play and cause that knowledge to exist in your present, but in the altered game, the introduction of future knowledge creates a feedback loop.
Of course the game isn’t needed. Simply seeing future you conveys the fact that you exist in the future. Should you, for example (and please don’t do this) see near future you then stab your arm with scissors, you will miss or be stopped because future you does not have a wounded arm.
I wonder what happens if future you’s arm is out of sight. would you be able to stab your arm then only for future you to then reveal a wounded arm?
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