The monotheistic all powerful one.
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.
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.
How does the judge determine whether the condemned man is “expecting it”?
Regardless of when he’s called, he could simply state that he was expecting to be called, and therefore the hanging would be called off.
Its a bad paradox because it pivots on something that cannot be properly defined.
I think it’s an anti-riddle, or a joke, more than anything else.
Cannot be properly defined? “Expecting it” means “regarding it likely to happen”, according to the dictionary. He regarded it as impossible to happen, so he was not expecting it. His own logic disproving the event (him being surprised) allowed the event to happen (he was surprised).
Why does the paradox suffer if he lies about the solution? The paradox has already played out, and anything after that is just set dressing.
Just off the top of my head, maybe the judge has a camera set to gauge his reaction to the knock on the door? Or maybe he goes into denial and tries to explain his logic, thus proving the paradox? Or maybe the judge doesn’t actually care as much as he said, but trusts the logic to hold out and make for a funny story?
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.
“Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn’t thought of that,” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
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.
And god created people with free will
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.
Christian here, don’t agree with your “biblical” interpretation
If Christians could agree with each other about what’s in the bible, history would be a lot more boring.
If your options are “do as I say” or “suffer for all eternity” you aren’t really capable of exercising free will.
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”.
God is not Omnibenevolent would be my take.
Just leaving God’s wife Ashera here. Yes, he was married once. Look it up.
He had a sister too, super evil but it’s ok because a human dude talked her out of destroying everything since God couldn’t stop her.
Carry on…
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
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 do not see any paradox there. Paradox is something contradictory. All your statements are true and do not contradict to each other.
The phrase, “You have to be intolerant to be tolerant” doesn’t sound like a contradiction to you?
Sounds like contradiction, yes, but it is just incorrect phrase. You do not have to be intolerant to be tolerant.
The society have to be intolerant to intolerance to be stable, not to be tolerant or intolerant.
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.
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.
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
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.Hang on, that’s not a decreasing trend. 1/√4 is not smaller, but larger than 1/4…?
From 1/√3 to 1/√4 is less of a decrease than from 1/3 to 1/4, just as from 1/3 to 1/4 is less of a decrease than from 1/(3²) to 1/(4²).
The curve here is not mapping 1/4 -> 1/√4, but rather 4 -> 1/√4 (and 3 -> 1/√3, and so on).
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=yZOi9HH5ueU
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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.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.
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
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?
Ship of Theseus applies to every human, because all our cells get replaced over and over until we die. At a cellular level, you’re wholly different from yourself 10 years ago. Are you still you?
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).
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.
I thought the paradox is why it keeps fucking asking me - I said yes dammit.
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).
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.
I like Gödel numbering as a means of proving that it is impossible to have a complete model of logic.
Could god microwave a burrito so hot even he couldn’t eat it?
All of the “is infinite power so powerful that it could overpower its own power” type questions just annoy me.
Is infinite power so powerful it can do something that it can’t do?
Yes it can. And then it can do that anyway. Otherwise it wouldn’t be infinite.
Only if he broke into a radio station & doused that burrito with hot sauce from a battery powered toy gun!
Also, I’m gonna need a football helmet full of cottage cheese & any naked pics of Bea Arthur you happen to have lying around.
I think Nietzsche already killed god decades ago. But not sure which one.
He killed the God that was knowing better than humans… but guess what God is coming back!
AGI form, the know it all, with AI FOSS engineers as its deciples, sharing the good word and upholding the temples, free of charge!
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 space is
REALLY
Fucking YUUUUUUGE
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.
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.
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. Carlin’s influence is awesome and deserved, but I don’t think it stretches that far :)
Yes. Yes he can. It’s only a paradox to our comprehension.
I don’t see why that’s a paradox. It’s like asking if infinity is bigger than infinity, where both infinities are aleph 0.
