2019-09-10 14:32:39

Hi!
So I just, loooove, paradoxes! Because they make me think about the world and how it exists and then I go into an existential chrisis, and then I die.

So, help me with my need for paradoxes!

What the hell do blind people see!
As a blind person myself, I don't know what color I see because I haven't... never seen colors!
People who have gone blind, what do you see?

One of the oldest: If you travel back in time and kill your grandfather you would sease to exist because your grandfather would never have made you, but then you would pop back into existance because then if you would go back in time and be at the same spot and then it would loop and you would be trapped...


Aaa!

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“Yes, sir. I am attempting to fill a silent moment with non-relevant conversation.”
“You don’t tell me how to behave; you’re not my mother!”
“Could you please continue the petty bickering? I find it most intriguing.” – Data (Star Trek: The Next Generation)

2019-09-10 14:56:58

Is an aircraft with a bunch of wimmon aboard unmanned ´?
Wouldn't the term manhole and dead man switch hurt gender rights?
How was the "do not enter" sign put onto the property it stands on now?
Why is it that March, April, May and June are names of months and people, but noone is called September?

Greetings Moritz.

Hail the unholy church of Satan, go share it's greatness.

2019-09-10 15:05:53

I'd say I see black, if anything. Considering my prosthetics, I guess I technically see nothing, but the closest in terms of colours would definitely be black.

To see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower.
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour.
William Blake - Auguries of Innocence, line 1 to 4

2019-09-10 15:30:32

ironically I went to school with someone called September.
Here's a paradox for you:
the line below this one never tells the truth.
The line above this one is a lie.

Nathan Smith
Managing Director of Nathan Tech
It's not disability
It's ability!

2019-09-10 16:59:30

In a small village lives a barber who shaves all men that don't shave themselves. Now, if he shaved himself, he would not only shave men that don't shave themselves, but also himself, which is a paradox. If he don't shaves himself, he would need another person who shaves him, but then our confused barber isn't the man who shaves all men that don't shave themselves, which is again a paradox.

A murderer is sentenced to death by the king. The king sais that, for extra punishment, the execution will be sometimes between monday and sunday next week, at exactly noon, but it's a surprise which day it'll be. The king says, for the prisoner, the execution will come unexpected. Now the prisoner thinks for a while and comes up with this: If it is saturday and it's afternoon, then my execution will be on sunday noon, but this wouldn't be unexpected then, so I can rule out sunday. Now, knowing my execution will not be at sunday, and friday noon is already over, I must conclude my execution will be at saturday noon, and this, again, is not unexpected, so I can rule that out too. If I continue this until monday, each date is not unexpected, so I conclude I can not be executed at all. The paradox is that the prisoner is executed on wednesday noon completely unexpected.

We are pleased, that you made it through the final challenge, where we pretended we were going to murder you. We are throwing a party in honor of your tremendous success. Place the device on the ground, then lay on your stomach with your arms at your sides. A party associate will arrive shortly to collect you for your party. Assume the party submission position or you will miss the party.

2019-09-10 18:02:25

How can infinity exist? Pretty much the same as my signature.

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“Yes, sir. I am attempting to fill a silent moment with non-relevant conversation.”
“You don’t tell me how to behave; you’re not my mother!”
“Could you please continue the petty bickering? I find it most intriguing.” – Data (Star Trek: The Next Generation)

2019-09-10 23:13:08

The murderer and execution thing is not actually a paradox, unless something is lost in translation.

I've always loved the one where you use two sentences to invalidate each other, as in a few posts back.

The grandfather paradox is probably the oldest and most well-known of these overall.

Check out my Manamon text walkthrough at the following link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/z8ls3rc3f4mkb … n.txt?dl=1

2019-09-11 03:53:20

Haha Jade I was just about to suggest that.

Oh no! Somebody released the h key! Everybody run and hide!

2019-09-11 06:30:07 (edited by Ethin 2019-09-11 06:41:20)

From some websites:
1. A crocodile snatches a young boy from a riverbank. His mother pleads with the crocodile to return him, to which the crocodile replies that he will only return the boy safely if the mother can guess correctly whether or not he will indeed return the boy. There is no problem if the mother guesses that the crocodile will return him—if she is right, he is returned; if she is wrong, the crocodile keeps him. If she answers that the crocodile will not return him, however, we end up with a paradox: if she is right and the crocodile never intended to return her child, then the crocodile has to return him, but in doing so breaks his word and contradicts the mother’s answer. On the other hand, if she is wrong and the crocodile actually did intend to return the boy, the crocodile must then keep him even though he intended not to, thereby also breaking his word.
2. Imagine that you’re about to set off walking down a street. To reach the other end, you’d first have to walk half way there. And to walk half way there, you’d first have to walk a quarter of the way there. And to walk a quarter of the way there, you’d first have to walk an eighth of the way there. And before that a sixteenth of the way there, and then a thirty-second of the way there, a sixty-fourth of the way there, and so on.
Ultimately, in order to perform even the simplest of tasks like walking down a street, you’d have to perform an infinite number of smaller tasks—something that, by definition, is utterly impossible. Not only that, but no matter how small the first part of the journey is said to be, it can always be halved to create another task; the only way in which it cannot be halved would be to consider the first part of the journey to be of absolutely no distance whatsoever, and in order to complete the task of moving no distance whatsoever, you can’t even start your journey in the first place.
3. Imagine a fletcher (i.e. an arrow-maker) has fired one of his arrows into the air. For the arrow to be considered to be moving, it has to be continually repositioning itself from the place where it is now to any place where it currently isn’t. The Fletcher’s Paradox, however, states that throughout its trajectory the arrow is actually not moving at all. At any given instant of no real duration (in other words, a snapshot in time) during its flight, the arrow cannot move to somewhere it isn’t because there isn’t time for it to do so. And it can’t move to where it is now, because it’s already there. So, for that instant in time, the arrow must be stationary. But because all time is comprised entirely of instants—in every one of which the arrow must also be stationary—then the arrow must in fact be stationary the entire time. Except, of course, it isn’t.
4. In his final written work, Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences (1638), the legendary Italian polymath Galileo Galilei proposed a mathematical paradox based on the relationships between different sets of numbers. On the one hand, he proposed, there are square numbers—like 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, and so on. On the other, there are those numbers that are not squares—like 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, and so on. Put these two groups together, and surely there have to be more numbers in general than there are just square numbers—or, to put it another way, the total number of square numbers must be less than the total number of square and non-square numbers together. However, because every positive number has to have a corresponding square and every square number has to have a positive number as its square root, there cannot possibly be more of one than the other.
Confused? You’re not the only one. In his discussion of his paradox, Galileo was left with no alternative than to conclude that numerical concepts like more, less, or fewer can only be applied to finite sets of numbers, and as there are an infinite number of square and non-square numbers, these concepts simply cannot be used in this context.
5. Imagine that a farmer has a sack containing 100 lbs of potatoes. The potatoes, he discovers, are comprised of 99% water and 1% solids, so he leaves them in the heat of the sun for a day to let the amount of water in them reduce to 98%. But when he returns to them the day after, he finds his 100 lb sack now weighs just 50 lbs. How can this be true? Well, if 99% of 100 lbs of potatoes is water then the water must weigh 99 lbs. The 1% of solids must ultimately weigh just 1 lb, giving a ratio of solids to liquids of 1:99. But if the potatoes are allowed to dehydrate to 98% water, the solids must now account for 2% of the weight—a ratio of 2:98, or 1:49—even though the solids must still only weigh 1lb. The water, ultimately, must now weigh 49lb, giving a total weight of 50lbs despite just a 1% reduction in water content. Or must it?
6. Imagine that a family has two children, one of whom we know to be a boy. What then is the probability that the other child is a boy? The obvious answer is to say that the probability is 1/2—after all, the other child can only be either a boy or a girl, and the chances of a baby being born a boy or a girl are (essentially) equal. In a two-child family, however, there are actually four possible combinations of children: two boys (MM), two girls (FF), an older boy and a younger girl (MF), and an older girl and a younger boy (FM). We already know that one of the children is a boy, meaning we can eliminate the combination FF, but that leaves us with three equally possible combinations of children in which at least one is a boy—namely MM, MF, and FM. This means that the probability that the other child is a boy—MM—must be 1/3, not 1/2.
This one will make your brain hurt.
7. Consider the expression:
"The smallest positive integer not definable in under sixty letters."
Since there are only twenty-six letters in the English alphabet, there are finitely many phrases of under sixty letters, and hence finitely many positive integers that are defined by phrases of under sixty letters. Since there are infinitely many positive integers, this means that there are positive integers that cannot be defined by phrases of under sixty letters. If there are positive integers that satisfy a given property, then there is a smallest positive integer that satisfies that property; therefore, there is a smallest positive integer satisfying the property "not definable in under sixty letters". This is the integer to which the above expression refers. But the above expression is only fifty-seven letters long, therefore it is definable in under sixty letters, and is not the smallest positive integer not definable in under sixty letters, and is not defined by this expression. This is a paradox: there must be an integer defined by this expression, but since the expression is self-contradictory (any integer it defines is definable in under sixty letters), there cannot be any integer defined by it.
Sources: https://mentalfloss.com/article/59040/1 … paradoxes, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry_paradox

"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!]: 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out ?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."    — Charles Babbage.
My Github

2019-09-11 07:39:59

I like some of these, but a couple of them are nonsense.

#2 is busted. If you want to perform a task, it's all in the language and the definition of the task. You can be said to be 1/2 or 1/4 done a given task, based on the language used. Yes, each step, each twitch of a muscle, is arguably its own task, but that's not what's being discussed.


#3 is tricky, but also busted. Time does not stop and start in instants. Things are not ever "frozen" completely in time or space. Motion is a general constant, to one degree or another. This is why space and time are considered (by some, at least) dimensions of their own. So if time cannot be stopped, and space is being passed through at a given rate, then this paradox has no sense. The idea of the "snapshot", the instant in time where everything stops, is simply not how time works. Even if you could somehow stop time and freeze the arrow, the very millisecond you started it again, the arrow would conceivably be moving upon its trajectory, and physics would take over.

#6 is also busted. As I understand it, if we know one child is a boy, we don't need to know the age of the other child. All we need to guess is whether or not the other child is a boy or a girl. If we find that the chances of having a child of a given gender are essentially equal, and independent of one another (i.e., you are not more predisposed to female children after having a male), then the first child is irrelevant, completely and utterly irrelevant. If you wanted to talk about the chances of having a particular combination of children, then yes, your chances are 1/4, and then 1/3. But all we want to talk about are the odds of having a boy or a girl. This is an independent variable, so the chance is 1/2.

Check out my Manamon text walkthrough at the following link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/z8ls3rc3f4mkb … n.txt?dl=1

2019-09-11 09:24:55 (edited by targor 2019-09-11 09:26:26)

@7 I don't think anything got lost in translation. It's called the unexpected hanging paradox and is actually still discussed today. You can look it up on Wikipedia.

We are pleased, that you made it through the final challenge, where we pretended we were going to murder you. We are throwing a party in honor of your tremendous success. Place the device on the ground, then lay on your stomach with your arms at your sides. A party associate will arrive shortly to collect you for your party. Assume the party submission position or you will miss the party.

2019-09-11 10:24:45

I have one.
you think that you have forgotten something, but you cant remember if you forgot you cant remember because you forgot and cant remember you ever forgot. it goes on. I have another similar.
You think something is happening all the time, but each time this thing happens, you forgot it did. How can you ever be sure if it's really happening?