If I tell you my previous statement was a lie and I'm telling the truth about it then I'm telling the truth in this statement and was lying in the previous also the "who wrote Beethoven" bit in doctor who, he could of wrote it in the first place but took it too him too early and then it seems as if it wrote itself the paradox. I wonder if everything started because of a paradox the opposite of nothing is everything infinitely no start point .. no end
The Grandfather Paradox is pretty easy to solve, actually. It's just that the answer is too boring for Hollywood. The reason the killer exists is because their birth was not prevented. So either the person they killed was not actually their grandfather, or their grandfather was not killed. What makes up the present already takes the past into account, so whatever happened in the past is always what had happened and there is no "changing" the present by altering the past.
no matter the day, I have a dose of Simon and his deep dive into al these amazing topics. I'm sure my family is tired of my shite. stay safe and awesome evryone, Simon, Writers, viewers! If you got a minute, checkout my links in my bio! xoxo
Giving you a raise would eat into the profits but not giving you a raise dis-incentivizes you from being productive enough to boost the company profits...
My favorite is the Astley Paradox: If you ask Rick Astley for his copy of the movie Up, he cannot give it to you as he will never give you Up. However, in doing so he lets you down. Thus creating the Astley Paradox.
The Bootstrap Paradox reminds me of something I heard about the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race. The BBC always covered it on the radio, so there'd be a commentator telling the listeners which team was ahead at every stage. However, at one point, the Thames curved in such a way that the commentator couldn't see the boats. However, he knew an ingenious way of telling who was winning at that point: he's heard that a man whose garden was near the river had a flagpole, and he'd hoist the team colour of whichever boat was ahead at that point: dark blue for Oxford and light blue for Cambridge. The commentator could just make out the flagpole with binoculars, so he'd confidently announce who was ahead, never letting on to his audience how he knew. This went on for many years, and finally, one year he decided to visit the man and see this famous flagpole close up. But when he got to it, it noticed something: it was impossible to see the Thames from that location. He pointed this out, and asked the man how he could tell which boat was ahead. "Oh, that's easy", he said, "I have a portable radio beside me, and I listen to the commentary on the BBC".
How would the man raise a flag when he heard it on the radio, and the radio announce it based on the flag? If both are waiting for the other, neither would act.
@@IAmUnderscore Because the flag was only for a single point in the race around a bend. There was someone in the lead prior to the bend so basically whoever was in the lead before going out of sight stayed in the lead (on radio at least) until they turned the bend back into sight.
@@snorgardark1908 No, @IAmUnderscore is correct. The announcer was NOT going by who was in the lead going into the turn. He relied solely on the visual image of the flag itself through the binoculars to determine the leader. So when the competitors approached the turn the announcer would've switched to the binos to see just a flagpole, waiting on the leading flag to be raised, while the guy at home waits on the radio announcer to tell him which to raise. It would fail immediately the first time.
This only works if neither team ever passes the other during the bend. It's not a paradox. The person raising the flag would be going off of the call the commentator last made; the positions before the bend. Otherwise, it leads to what was mentioned above. Neither acting.
So much of this relies on actually having a Time Machine. The last time I popped down to ‘Dimensional Instabilities r Us’, they were clean out of time machines. The sales assistant suggested that as the future hadn’t happened yet, there were none to be had at any price. He did suggest that when the right bit of future had happened, time machines would then be available now and indeed at any time in the past present or future.
Talk to Mr. Adams. He's the manager at Dimensional Instabilities 'R' Us. He's the best. Doug has helped me with all kinds of paradoxical issues over the years. And if your into probability drives,, He also makes a mean cup of tea .. extra hot😉
Surely the lack of evidence that a time traveler hasn't announced themselves to the world must mean time travel is never invented? Well, being able to go back in time at least.
I just love Diogenes. That dude was an OG "No you're wrong and I'll explain why"- kinda dude. Zeno claiming that motion doesn't exist and Diogenes disproving it just by walking in circles or when Plato claimed that Human is just a featherless bi-pedal, so Diogenes plucked feathers off from a chicken and just blasted it on the floor claiming how this is Plato's man in front of his students lmao
I love that when Alexander the great first met him napping naked next to stoop. He stood over him and explained that he was Alexander the great and sought him out because of his notoriety and wanted to meet him and help him in any way he could. Diogenes replied with, "Could you stand over there? You're blocking my sunlight." STRAIGHT GANGSTER AND HARD AF
Zeno was hitting at something very deep but he just couldn't understand it. The mathematics wasn't there and wouldn't be there for 1500 years. That he formulated the concept of an infinite number of things adding up a finite number is a massive intellectual leap. But the idea of the infinite was beyond him so he concluded the premise of the question was invalid and therefore motion is impossible because that's all that made sense to him.
Stephen King's "November 22, 1963" is quite possibly one of the best books ever written about reverse causation. It's something I've thought about a lot and always agreed with, and Simon mentions it too in this video.
Maybe that's why there is a shooter on the knoll...because of some future time traveler attempted to stop the one shooter, that's why time had to create the 2nd. And when they attempted to stop that guy is why one of the newest theories is that the weird angle is cuz in the panic of the situation one of the secret service guys tripped and accidentally discharged the fatal bullet. 🤔 it's repairing the attempts to stop it. just a quick game of wild suppositions...sorry. lol.
If the prisoner is told that One day this week you will be executed but not on the day that would be a surprise he would be expecting to be executed any day. The surprise would be if the execution did not happen. Therefore prisoner can not be executed becous it would be expected.
@@1tho3 Except in countries like Japan, you don't get to know what day you'll be executed until the executioner knocks on your door; yet there isn't a prison full of people who can't be executed . . .
production feedback: Audio dynamic compression is a great move, but the compression seems to have too fast a release time (inhaled breath comes in loud), and the de-esser needs to aim for a higher frequency.
Prisoner's paradox as told by Simon is actually funny double paradox. Even if the executioner came on Friday, the judge would still be right. After Thursday night, you would be sure you've won, so Friday knock would be a terrible surprise for you :D
@@probusexcogitatoris736 As someone with a BS in CS and has been looking for a job for over a year with not a single interview despite being top of his class because of exactly what Doom stated I can confidently say you are wrong. "Entry level position looking for a recent graduate who hasn't been employed prior. Must have: 8+ years of experience in x,y,z." This is exactly what I see, EVERY FUCKING DAY on most of the job listings for "Entry level". It doesn't matter what position, or business, they almost all have this type of bs.
What about the worlds oldest profession, supposedly prostitution. Peter Hathaway Capstick pointed out there had to be an older profession in order for the prostitute to be paid. So the worlds oldest profession was probably a hunter. Dunno if thats a paradox or just deep thinking.
Yeah, it's actually quite distracting. I wonder if he is coming off some sort of health thing, which also explains why Karl Smallwood took over Biographics.
@@6thwilbury2331 That has absolutely NOTHING to do with why Simon Whistler left Biographics, Geographics, and TopTenz. It was all about personal or business disagreements with the producers (the Harris family) of those 3 channels. If health had anything to do with it, then why did he never stop making videos for almost all of his other many channels?
Years ago, at a science fiction convention, I purchased a button that reads, "The statement on this button is false". It is my favorite. It's even more fun when people tell me, "I don't get it". Then I have to explain to people what a paradox is. 🦆🦆
@@michaelhowell2326The pleasure of explaining things wears off quickly, then got becomes have to. There's a stage after that called figure it out yourself that op clearly hasn't reached yet. It's not that hard to Google shit.
@@levilandes1719 one doesn't wear something like a big pin unless they want it as conversation piece. If it got to the "have to" point, just take it off. And Google is no replacement for human interaction. People are losing that ability.
@@michaelhowell2326 It's a shirt, I have a bunch of t shirts with graphics that I barely pay attention to. A shirt is old to me, not to others, and their curiosity is still their problem and still not mine. Not everyone enjoys human interaction, some people are able to meet that need with minimal contact through impersonal means, such as the comment section of a TH-cam video. And other people's needs are again, their problem, not mine. I'll feed you if you're hungry, but if you want company keep marching.
That's not a paradox. That's management congratulating themselves on THEIR success managing the disposable fool- errr... employees... while they worked at home, but now, management wants to manage the VALUED EMPLOYEES (remembered to use the polite word that time) at work, because it's more convenient for management.
@@devikwolf I think you mean 'deepen my understanding of the language'. 'Learn the language better' would be in reference to the quality of my learning as I actively learn the language. I'm not learning the language, I mastered it sometime after I read my first novel at 4 y.o. Keep going cobber, you'll get there.
Thank you for pointing out the watch paradox in "Somewhere In Time". I remember having a rather ...ahh ... heated discussion with my then wife about the impossibility of the watch. She thought I was being too picky and should just "enjoyed the film". This may have been part of the reason we are no longer together.
The watch surely follows the Bounty paradox. If you had a ship called the Bounty and over the years had to swap out sails, planks, steering wheel and so on, would that still be the ship? How would it be if you took the swapped out parts and built a ship with them. Which ship is the original Bounty? But if your ex-wife differs that much, it would show on other ends, too. Not every marriage is built to last.
If we consider what he said in the video about time refusing to allow a paradox to exist, then it's likely that somewhere along the way the original watch gets swapped out for one like it, so the same watch isn't going through time over and over. Like she gives him the watch, a pickpocket mugs him and swaps the watch with a cheap knock-off without him realizing, he goes back in time and gives it to her, she carries it all those years, gives it to him, he's mugged and it's swapped for a cheap knock-off, etc, so it's always a "new" watch going through time. Time just sprayed some paradox-be-gone on the watch. :)
The answer to the dichotomy paradox always seemed so obvious to me. The idea that you have to take an infinite number of steps to cover a finite distance inherently presupposes that you have to "arrive" at each halfway point and stop there before continuing on meaning that, at some point, for some arbitrary reason you have to start taking smaller and smaller 'steps' so that you don't pass the next halfway point without stopping and counting a new step. There is no reason to do that other than to satisfy the artificial restriction imposed by the wording of the paradox. Another version of this would be filling a cylindrical bucket from hose with a constant stream of water. If the bottom to the top of the bucket is thought of as equivalent to the distance run by the runner in the dichotomy paradox, the water could only satisfy the requirements of the paradox if you stoo the flow of water as you go along each time you hit the next halfway point, but then you are denying the initial condition that I mentioned that you are filling the bucket with a constant flow from a hose. The fact that we observe time flowing and have not actually figured out a way of stopping it indicates that this type of paradox simply doesn't describe the reality we live in so it is a mathematical/philosophical curiosity but not something that describes anything we see I'm the real world such as motion through space.
Bootstrap paradox happens quite often in technical analysis. It's a method to predict the future price of a stock by looking at the patterns in the stock price. For example, if it forms a "head and shoulders" pattern or a "cup and handle" pattern, those indicate that it will increase in price. If you buy in as a result of these patterns and the expected increase in price, you disrupt the patterns and change the predicted future of the stock.
The surprise paradox ceases to be a paradox because, if you accept the premise of the prisoner's logic, Not being hanged becomes a possibility. This means that even being hung on the Friday becomes a surprise.
Dresden Files had a funny retort to the Grandfather paradox Harry: So if I go back in time to kill my grandfather Vadderung: he beats you senseless I suspect
Eating an entire pizza is one task, no matter how many slices you cut it into. Running a journey with an end point is one task no matter how many times you want to divide it up.
The sum of an infinite sequence can be a finite number. Once we proved this mathematically it showed the logical fallacy in Zeno's idea. Zeno assumed that the sum of an infinite sequence must be infinity. See numberphile for surprisingly easy to understand examples.
@@philwood5288 the easist example is a joke. an infinite number of mathematicians go into a bar. the 1st order 1 pint, the second orders 1/2 of a pint, the 3rd orders 1/4 of a pint, the 4th orders 1/8 of a pint the barman pours 2 pints and tells them they should know their limit
This is the best explanation that I have seen for visualizing the apparentparadox, though the fundamental error of Zeno's analysis is disregarding that each step becomes shorter in time as it becomes shorter in distance. That is the analysis that gives rise to the mathematical concept of limits.
The steps or yards the runner walks may be divided down, but at some point, the size of the division becomes so small, that he just steps over it. This is also why animation in computers has traditionally had a 1% breaker. The amount of computing power needed to animate beyond that point far exceeds the visible capabilities, so the end of any animation is always a jump we don't see as one.
As a mathematical physicist of 8 years, I find none of these that mind blowing. Paradoxes arise from a simple lack in understanding of something somewhere along the line.
With regard to the Lair's Paradox, it seems the true value of a statement isn't always to be found in it but might rely on the web of statements in which it's found/embedded. Wittgensteinian-like.
Well yes, when intentionally manipulating something like a language or equation to break logic then the only thing that statement is making is that language is not perfect method of defining logical statements. Still useful to know.
@@kyleellis1825No, it was just taken out of context. The previous page ended with "So by the aforementioned reasoning I can only come to one conclusion:" and the next page read: "This statement is false." Feels bad, when people assume you're a great philosopher yet all you did was forget to throw the last page of a script into the bin as well.
Regarding the Dichotomy Argument, that reminds me of something I read that relates. A mathematician and (I believe it was) an engineer are put in a room with a beautiful woman and told that they can have their way with her. But they can only approach her every 5 minutes by halving the distance to her. The mathematician storms out saying it's impossible because he'd never reach her. The engineer stays saying eventually he'd be close enough for all practical purposes.
In your example, the distance is halved every time but the duration is always the same (5 minutes), that means the speed is halved too every time so it tends to 0. The mathematician will never be able to reach the woman (in theory at least, because in physics the Planck length seems to be the smallest bit of space possible). In the Dichotomy Argument, both the distance and the duration are halved so the speed remains the same, which means it will take a finite amount of time to run a finite total distance.
Is that what's causing it? I was doing P.A. announcing just a few days ago. I had run across the field to get a pronunciation on a name, then ran back to the box about 20 seconds before I had to start talking. Almost certainly sounded just like Simon does in this video.
Years ago the tax service I used for my business would send me a huge packet of paperwork. Quad duplicate everything. For a one man business. THIS PAGE HAS BEEN INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK. So is the page actually blank?
What timing - I was writing a friend today about a restaurant they recommended named Burger Paradox. Because I'm such a nerd, I wrote "...What's the paradox of the burger? Do you bite into said burger and taste a taco, or something? Does the sheer deliciousness defy logic and reason? Do you show up to eat, then finish AS you arrive?"
Xeno's Paradox is based on a mistake in thinking. That mistake is attempting to smuggle the concept of infinity into a definitely finite realm. In any case, you CAN'T keep diving the remaining distance "infinitely." You can do it a mind-numbingly large number of *finite* times, but you can NEVER do it an *infinite* amount of times, since you can always do it once more, which renders the whole exercise rather pointless. So, you're only ever going to diving the remaining distance a *finite* number of times, for a *finite* distance, where the runner/ arrow/ etc, travels a fixed, *finite* distance with each step/ over each arbitrary time period. Since all our variables here are *finite* we can represent them with numbers. However, infinity is NOT a number, it's a concept (it's another mistake in thinking to assume that infinity is a number, or that we can achieve infinity in any way) and so it fails to interact meaningfully with any of the variables. It's like trying to multiple the number 3 by the concept of justice; it produces no meaningful results.
Man it's funny I was rambling to my Mom the other day about a version of one of Zeno's paradoxes (the arrow paradox) because it was used to explain asymptotes to me by my honestly amazing Algebra 2 teacher. I had that lesson over a decade ago but it still sticks with me! Took me some time but when my brain finally connected how asymptotes and limits worked together it made infinite limits much easier for me to wrap my head around. There must be some miss information out there because my Algebra 2 teacher said the arrow paradox was debunked by Diogenes firing an arrow and it ya know... hitting the target. Or maybe he was using some creative liberties!
My favorite thing about this channel is how everyone acts like they're smart in the comments. And then leaves their Google account settings to public so you can see their history. And see the truth. 😅
Regarding which came first, "The Chicken or the Egg" paradox/problem of causality, there is a possible resolution. I think this problem/paradox can be solved by substituting the Chicken with a Horse and Donkey, and the Egg with a Mule. By doing this, the direction of causality can be established, and should hold true for other characters or similar scenarios. This is because a Mule is the offspring of a Horse and Donkey, and not the other way around. As far as I can tell, Paradoxes typically have a hidden fallacy masquerading as a truth, thus setting up an unresolvable quandary.
It's also the egg in the sense that eggs existed millions of years before birds, and the egg that hatched the first chicken was not laid by a chicken (they're a hybrid species of two Indian Junglefowl) very much in the same way that neither parent of the mule was a mule.
An episode of Doctor Who posited the Bootstrap Paradox where the world suddenly doesn't know about Beethoven. The Time Traveler travels back in time with all of Beethoven's works and teaches him (Beethoven) how to play his own music. Beethoven passes the work off as his own and makes no mention of the Time Traveller.
Not quite. In the explanation the time travellers wants the music sheets to be signed by Beethoven. But there is no Beethoven at all. So the time traveler publishes Beethoven's music himself and basically becomes Beethoven.
A favourite of mine: You assert that time travel is real, you boast/brag whatever. Then pick your stooge. Say to them that you can prove Time travel exists and when you do, they have to buy you a drink. Once agreed tell the truth "If time travel doesnt exist, how do we get older?" Then enjoy your drink. The point is, when we talk about Time Travel, people assume going back in time to see/do something or jumping forward in time in order to gwin something, such as see the first manned mission to mars land or see if mankind does move to another planet or whatever. We dont talk about what time it is.
It's not that time travel isn't possible, and indeed we _all_ time travel whenever we change our motion (eg "the faster you move through space the slower you move through time"). Indeed, travelling into the future doesn't create _any_ issues whatsoever (Einsteins "twins paradox" is _not_ a paradox!), it's only travelling into the past that is problematic.
Time doesn't exist, so time travel is meaningless. We have a flawed perception of reality that makes us believe time exists, when in fact there is no such thing as time. Einstein's theory of relativity suggests the universe is a static, four-dimensional block that contains all of space and time simultaneously - with no special “now”. The future to one observer is the past to another. That means time doesn't flow from past to future, as we experience it. Time is an illusion.
Just a couple of thoughts for some of the paradoxes Bootstrap paradox: when you travel back in time to give anything, information or something physical or a physical interaction, you become the source of the change, and when you go back to the future, it's not how you left it. I understand the paradoxical change implied by who started the closed loop, but the loop became open once you introduced yourself to it. Opening the loop allows for many variations to occur, one of them being that Einstein had the knowledge from the start, but you going back to give him his book didn't teach him about relativity, it just put his thoughts into print. Zeno's paradox: we have an endpoint. If we walk a mile, we know our endpoint. We can divide the endpoint down infinitely, but that doesn't change that we will reach it sometime during our travel. Granted, adding fractions along every step mathematically wont give us a 1:1, but that doesn't change the outcome of us walking a mile.
If they developed the paradox long before crack was invented, then they couldn't have been smoking crack in order to create said paradox. Though you might be able to find a chain of events between the birth of the paradox leading to the creation of crack. Then you could take that crack back in time to have them smoke it in order to develop the paradox that would then lead to the creation of crack and begin the cycle anew. Ironically, creating yet another paradox.
When I was eight, I asked my babysitter why I couldn't pick myself up. I knew I couldn't, I understood that experientially, I was just trying to work through the logical semantics....
- "I did not know what I should gift you for your birthday. So, I travelled to the future and had a look." - "Oh cool, a pair of socks... and a paradox!"
Regarding the running paradox: at some point, each of the two parts of the divided space will be less than the length of the runner's foot, which automatically means that he has completed the task and moves on to the next one, thus the entire distance is covered.
Life lesson. If a man says he is lying, you can’t trust him. Same rules as in Scream 4. To quote Sidney, “if you can’t trust him don’t open the door.” If Scream isn’t your franchise then maybe Dune when the Baron killed the Doctor. You can’t trust traitor. Crumbled paper can’t be perfect again so if a man says he’s lying. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not because trust is gone.
To answer the zeno paradox involving running a mile, the issue stands that eachnchalleng/task is viewed as if it was the same volume as the previous task. Running a 16th of a mile is not the same as running a 30th, rather you run 2 30ths of a mile to run a 16th. Through everyday life you are solving an infinite number of tasks all to solve one task, if you pick up a toy you are doing one task but are also picking up 4 quarters of the same object. This isnt a paradox but rather an understanding of the fact we are made of an infinite number of parts capable of each solving their own tasks. 1/4 of your hand can lift say 4 rocks, and so on.
I believe the grandfather paradox is truly not a paradox but misunderstood. If I were to go back in time to kill my grandfather I will always be foiled because I exist. No matter how many times I try he will survive because I exist in the future and energy can not be erased once it exists. So my grandfather will always survive my attempts and/or I will be stopped from trying every single time.
@@vali3033 I don’t believe time travel will ever exist. Just because the equations say it’s possible doesn’t mean in practice it can be achieved. Even if you could send atoms into the future for a few seconds or into the past it won’t translate to humans being able to.
Bloody well done, Simon ‼️ How you got through all of that without tripping up, is a paradox of its own 😊❤ Why was the cat not being alive or dead, Schrödinger not being my favourite chap, not included?
(This statement is true (+) x is true (+)) = true (+) (This statement is true (+) x is false (-))= false (-) (This statement is false (-) x is true (+)) = false (-) (This statement is false (-) x is false (-)) = true (+) (This statement is t or f) is the first variable. The (is t or f) part is the second variable. No matter what the second variable is it doesn’t change the first variable. They both combine to give a new answer. The self reference part is meaningless. It is no different than saying this is the number 5. The only reason this is a paradox is because for some reason we are allowing the original statement to change. Instead of combining the statement with the response. This is equivalent to saying a=a or b therefore a can also be b. Instead of a x b = c.
A long time ago when I took a few university classes in philosophy, an acquaintance told me 'philosophy is just mental masturbation'. These paradoxes reminded me of that and boy, was he right!
Tripped out. Regarding the Xeno paradox, I believe the answer is simple: there aren't infinite subdivisions of space to traverse, there's only a finite number of Planck length segments. The paradox statement itself contains a factual error.
@@simesaidIndeed, however, my understanding is that the pixelated nature of spacetime is fairly certain at this point, but of course not an absolute certainty as you point out.
@@simesaid Electrical charge, energy, light, angular momentum, and matter are all quantized. Given that distance is just a measurement of the space between 2 things, it kind of follows that distance is also quantized. It would make no sense to talk about the distance between 2 photons that are next to each other as that doesn't exist. You can't be 1/2 a photon away.
As a mathematician, this one amused me. See, math is logicism. That's why we include logic symbols. Unfortunately, nobody learns anything beyond arithmetic. Math is used to evaluate logic. In fact, it's a language used for that purpose. That's where we get concepts that many will recognize like 'proofs'. You're proving the logic of the statement. Also, I fuckin' love Zeno. He had more than one paradox but we only ever talk about the one.
Comic book logic actually seems very logical to me. The universe itself isn’t thinking of ways to prevent the paradox but say if you went back in time to kill your grandfather, then you wouldn’t exist to go back in those to kill your grandfather. So the only universe to exist would be one in which your grandfather never had you as a grandson. Or you died before the act could be committed. Or you just never decide to commit the act. Or any other thing that prevented you from doing it. So any action you took to change the past would be futile because it is self correcting. I think that’s what the Avengers Endgame writers had in mind when they said they had to return the stones to the moment they were taken from. Although they did change the past when they let Loki escape, that changed the past. So I think if we ever invented time travel we would have unlimited historical knowledge but no way to change it.
If a problem or question has an answer that causes you to go in a infinite loop then it is not a paradox, it is a logic knot. Paradoxes are impossibilities, imagine if someone gave you a math problem and you got the answer 2=7. You think to yourself, “I must of made a mistake” so you look over the problem and can’t find a mistake. So you redo the entire the problem but slower but you get 2=7. Confused you get a smart person, a proper mathematician and he goes through the same issue, 2=7 and there is no mistakes made and there is nothing wrong with the equation. That is a paradox 2=7. But… Bootstrap Logic-knot doesn’t sound as cool as Bootstrap Paradox There is also Conundrums which are problems/questions that can have a answer that is both correct and incorrect at the same time.
I once read an article about studies that were done about studies. Those studies revealed that many studies are either forged, done with a bias or made very unprecisly and that people give studies too much value. I was a stoner back then and really high and i couldn't handle it. "If i believe a study that tells me many studies are wrong than...." 😃
So I actually have hypothetical solutions to most of these paradoxes; I know there's some hubris in that claim, but bear with me. The Liar's Paradox: "This statement is false" and variants. To solve this, I contend that every statement includes an implied assertion of truth; "The sky is blue" is really "It is true that the sky is blue," but applied to all statements. (Technically, it also includes a lot of other assertions of truth; that there is a sky, that the color blue exists, et cetera and so forth.) If we make explicit the assertion of truth in the liar's paradox we're left with "It is true that this statement is false." This is simply self-contradictory, and we can disregard attempting to determine if a self-contradictory statement is true or false. If I tell you "8 is greater than 9, but 9 is greater than 8" then it's pretty easy to find the contradiction in my own statement. It doesn't matter if one half of the statement is correct and the other is incorrect (or if they're both incorrect!), they cannot both be correct. Grandfather/Bootstrap Paradoxes: Both of these are rooted in time travel, and they both have the same resolution. Under all circumstances humans have experienced thus far, we move forward in time, and causality generally makes sense. If I throw a ball, the ball will go forward until air resistance and gravity pull it to the ground, or it hits another object. However, I contend that causality is by nature *only* forward-facing in time; there is no such thing as a cause creating an effect earlier in time than itself. This means that time travel is either impossible or it requires a breach of causality to even occur, and in such breach is the resolution to the paradox. From the time travelers perspective, the cause is "I turned on the time machine" and the effect is "I appeared in the past," but that's only from the traveler's perspective. I say that the appearance of the time traveler in the past actually becomes, from the universe's perspective, an "uncaused effect." It doesn't have a cause for the purposes of causality; it just happens. This means that no matter what is done in the past, it cannot effect the time traveler's arrival, even if the time traveler prevents themselves from creating time travel for any reason. The use of the time machine has already broken causality and the time traveler will appear in the past. (Bonus points: This explains the Big Bang! Time travelers did it, creating an uncaused effect that started the universe. Will time travelers in our future go back and start the Big Bang? It doesn't matter! The effect that caused the Big Bang has become a universal truth.) Zeno's Paradoxes: I think that Zeno actually simply proved that the universe is, on some level, digital/binary rather than truly analog. All of his paradoxes rely on the concept that you can cut a given measurement in half *infinitely*. However, they are defeated by simply postulating a non-analog universe. If there is, on some incredibly tiny level, either a discrete measurement of distance or a discrete measurement of time that cannot be subdivided, then Zeno's paradoxes resolve themselves. Lets call these hypothetical discrete measurements "hypometers" and "hyposeconds." Remember that these are incredibly tiny and any measurement would require several layers of scientific notation to measure, but they mean that, at some point, in order to move two hypometers you need to move one hypometer, and there is no such thing as a half-hypometer. You either move the hypometer or do not. So you move one hypometer, and then you move the second hypometer, on and on and on a nearly-infinite number of times until you move one regular meter. The same goes for hyposeconds; either you are moving during a given hyposecond or you are not. If you are moving, then you will proceed whatever distance during one hyposecond, and there will be a finite and measurable (but truly gargantuan) number of hyposeconds before you reach the destination. These are easy to think about for those of us who use computers; your monitor refreshes only so many times per second, each time with a single discrete frame and if that number is high enough it appears to create fluid motion even though it is indeed a series of still images. So a hyposecond would be one "frame" of the universe itself, and a hypometer would be one pixel. But instead of 60 frames per second on a 1920x1080 monitor, this is googols^googols of frames per second on a googols^googols x googols^googols x googols^googols of three dimensional "pixels." Does this also prove that our universe is a simulation on someone else's bigger binary computer? Eh, maybe.
Xenos paradox can be solved by adding a metric tensor to the halving function that represents the plank length as its quanta. Halving is nothing but a function and doesn’t seek to terminate. But for the math to apply in the real world there’s needs to be a metric tensor overlayed consisting of the plank length relative to the casual extent of each “point”. The plank length alone stops the infinite loop as you can only half the mile until the plank limit. But then this is furthered by each participant (Achilles, tortoise) having an area of effect beyond the described point isn’t considered in the equation. So you need variable for points and a tensor that applies the plank length as a limit on the original distance. Also in the original problem the halving function is impossible to factor without a time metric because there tortoise isn’t static at any point but slowly advancing. There half way mark is changing at a rate that has to be divided into individual time stamps to consider a real number for half way.
For more on the liar paradox, Russell's paradox, Zeno's paradox, and Gödel's incompleteness theorem I recommend reading "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas Hofstadter.
This was so fun 😊 I've heard of many of these previously, but the in-depth commentary was fascinating! You have an innate talent for holding the viewers' attention, no matter the subject t matter. REALLY enjoy this channel!
9:14 In Jurassic Park, Jeff Goldblum explains chaos theory by dripping water unto Laura Dern’s hand and the drops take different paths. My idea about the “comic book logic” prevention theory is that each cycle of ‘grandfather dying - you not being born - grandfather living - you being born and going back in time’ plays out differently each time. Eventually a random chance will prevent you killing him (such as him dying in an unrelated accident before having any children), and this becomes what always happened
I have always taken the phrase "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" as being emotional, not physical. You've had a failure, you're feeling down, blue useless etc. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps! Or, to use a more recent phrase, "suck it up, buttercup" or a slightly older phrase "get over it". Let go of what has you feeling down, perk up and move on!
Predestination is one of my favorite movies and was a great representation of a Bootstrap Paradox. Recently too Bodies and a more popular show Dark. All utilize the paradox really well.
You must separate reality from language. Language describes reality, not itself. "This statement is false" twists inexperienced human brains to force language into acting on itself, a recipe for confusion. Similar conundrums are, "this egg is not an egg," or, "I don't exist."
But the Zeno's paradox is easy to dispel if you consider time to be a factor. If you assume a constant speed for the completion of the distance then the time for a part of this is going to equal the overall time divided by the length of the sub distance. Thus 1/2 the distance = 1/2 the time, 1/4 distance = 1/4 time etc. So although technically you can subdivide the distance into infinity then the time would subdivide the same amount until an infinite subdivision would equal 0 time.
2:08 I am perfectly willing to dismiss it as nonsensical. I also firmly believe that time loops break causality, because causality can be applied both on the microscopic scale (single events) and the macroscopic scale (groups of events). If a time loop is viewed as a macroscopic event, it has no cause, and thus breaks causality. The only ways around this are to imply a progression of timelines (time itself experiencing time, which would then fall victim to the same reasoning and necessitate the existence of an infinite hierarchy of "time"s, which is itself paradoxical or otherwise outside the bounds of logic) or to assert that the universe was originally set up deterministically so that no time travel would ever create a time paradox, which in its turn necessitates the existence of a timeless intelligence to cause the universe to be set up in such a way, which yet again forces us into a conclusion outside the bounds of causality.
12:00 this paradox description leaves out an important factor: each of the infinite number of tasks would take an infinitely small amount of time. So, you end up with ∞/∞ -- in this case since it can be rightly assumed both infinities would be equally large as they derive from the same linear subdivision, the conclusion would be there is no influence on the time taken overall as the resulting factor would be equal to 1, exactly.
Zeno paradoxes were a pillar of my college metaphysics professor’s proof for the existence of a god. When he presented the paradox I was also taking calculus, and for my paper at the end of the semester I had to take a stance and either support or dispute all of the major topics we had covered. I plotted the distance velocity and time in such a way to show that for a given velocity it was impossible for the runner to take longer than the time dictated by their velocity (infinite addition to a finite sum). He said I wasn’t allowed to do that because math and philosophical arguments are different. Still got an A though so I guess it’s ok.
I’ve always been bothered by Zeno’s Paradox. It says, “that which is in locomotion must arrive at the halfway point before it arrives at its goal.” Then, for no reason other than to serve the creation of a paradox, it basically keeps shifting the start of the journey upon clearing the halfway point. I know that math/physics solutions based on the limits of time divisions have been provided, but that’s not my issue. My problem is that a traveller doesn’t hit ‘reset’ on their goal when they reach the halfway point. If they start and end a journey in motion, all that can be claimed by Zeno’s Paradox is this: “In order to reach a destination, anything set in motion must pass the halfway point.”
I am only on the 1st paradox and i have it paused just staring at the wall. Our dog is 14 and lost his best friend 8 or 9 months ago to cancer.. our MollyBird. Broke my heart.. and he hasn't been the same since.. and he has been diagnosed with Cognitive Dissonance specifically it is Sundowner's for dogs. The Vet put him on some medications recently that have helped him and the "episodes" i guess aren't as severe or frequent and that has made me happy.. so for the most part he is a lot better but sometimes he will just stand there and stare at the wall for 20 mins and i will walk over and ask him what exactly are you pondering there?? I think he ponders the liars paradox. I know that it has broken my brain for the night and it's just the first one.
The grandfather paradox is actually easy. It's simply a 4 step bootstrap paradox. Step one go back in time, step two do the thing, step three you now cannot/do not go back in time, step the fourth the reason you go back in time still happens.
that was a really interesting summary, thanks Simon. :) I've always been a fan of The Grandfather Paradox, but I've also always believed that from your perspective (being the one who traveled back in time), nothing would really change... not because of any crazy correcting force intended to "balance the scales", but simply because by traveling through time, you would disconnect yourself entirely from the timeline that you left. this would create a branch in time at the historic point you arrived at, and you would continue your own progression through that new timeline instead. the timeline that resulted in you being born, is technically still in your own personal past. so, no.. I don't think that going back in time to kill your own grandfather would cause you to suddenly cease to exist.
Time loops you're talking about reminds me of Harry Potter in the Prisoner of Azkaban. He says "I knew I could do it because I had already done it," when referencing how he was able to cast such a powerful patronus charm.
The Liar's Paradox is not a Paradox in certain multivalued logics. For example, a third value can be Unknown, which can be True, False, Both, Neither, or none of those, but which it is cannot be determined. Fuzzy Logic also bypasses this Paradox. The Truth value here is a continuum, so the Liar statement can have a percentage truth value, which automatically adjusts based on the statement, such that the alternate formulations don't create a paradox. The unexpected hanging can be reduced to a single day or have the prisoner executed on the last day and still have the same effect. Unexpected here is "you cannot come up with a logical deduction that you will be hanged on the day before the hanging" The prisoner deduces that he cannot be hanged on the single remaining day. Therefore the actual hanging is a surprise. It turns out that there is a flaw even in the very first step. Deducing that you will be unexpectedly hanged on the next day is impossible. If you can deduce you will be hanged, then you will not be hanged. If you will not be hanged, you cannot deduce you will be hanged. This is a situation where you cannot make any valid deduction about whether you will be hanged. And so the hanging is slways unexpected.
Motion IS impossible. Motion is a concept of going from point a to point b through time But time can not be divided any further than the plank length.....since there is no half plank length, movement through time can not occur from one plank to the next, it is a jump from one plank to the next....hence, no motion is actually taking place
I always like thinking of the time travellers paradox as the time traveller is travelling to differing versions of time: A1) Einstein invents relativity ->A2) get in time machine with theory of relativity and go back in time-> B1) You teach Einstein the theory of relativity and go back to your time->B2) Einstein has published the theory of relativity under his own name. This way, the theory has a point of origin just in a different timeline
With the surprise hanging paradox, I wonder if it's possible that the judge had some knowledge that would mean that if he was to word the hanging in the way he did, the prisoner might come to the conclusion that he did? Meaning that the judge explained things as you mentioned leaving the prisoner to conclude the logic he came up with yet the Judge still clearly picking a day for the hanging and there in lies the surprise. The prisoner thought he had some sound knowledge but the judge makes a somewhat random selection of the day causing the surprise in the prisoner. Just a thought!
At school our teacher told us we would have a surprise quiz somewhere next week. I told him it couldn't be on a Friday and explained why, then someone else chimed in that it also couldn't be on Thursday then... when we arrived at the final conclusion the math teacher explained this paradox to us. I love math and logic!
Most of the "paradoxes" we encounter have at least one tremendous fault within their logic & are only declared as "paradoxes" due to the lack of understanding. For example: 1) The whole "This statement is false" is entirely irrelevant because it is only concerning an isolated perspective and is entirely self-referential. Beyond the context of that specific sentence, nothing else is affected in any way. Because of this, it doesn't matter whether the statement is actually true OR false, it only exists within the scope of its own defined terms. The same could easily be said of the "Bootstrap Paradox." 2) Many other so-called "paradoxes" arise from a limited understanding of the object's fundamental premises. Here, we get to examples like "how did the universe begin; how was everything created from nothing?" Although they are phrased as questions here, their answers lie somewhere between our current understanding. This also applies to the seemingly paradoxical nature of entangled quantum particles. There's a determined relationship between the particles, it's just that we have not yet found the bit of info that inextricably binds said particles which embroils us into frenzied debates on the nature of reality. There can be things which seem mutually exclusive, yet are not. There are things where a limited understanding of more fundamental behaviors leads us to conclude that both contradict the other. And there are things which are self-referential and/or have circular logic. All of these are phenomena that arise from our own ignorance and hubris.
The Darren Shan saga gave a good example for grandfather paradox It’s going into the past won’t stop the events only delay until someone else completes the act for why the person goes back
Grandfather paradox can absolutely be accomplished. If in your future time travel becomes possible you go back kill him and you are never born, but time travel still gets made, just without your grandfather of your dad or you. It can only happen once but that's all that's needed to fulfill.
the problem with Zenos paradox as the video stated is the division of distance. a normal person won’t shrink with the each division just like they won’t be able to take a single 1/2 mile step. so while you might be able to fit an absurd amount of delineations into that [30inch] step, the step itself is what should be measured
11:00 f Zeno's locomotion paradox is a bad example for unsolvable paradoxes: He actually argues that a sum of ▪︎infinitely many and ▪︎each finite timespans could not be finite. By this time he already has split _a finite distance_ into ▪︎infinitely many ▪︎each finite distances, thus _proving himself_ that a sum of infinitely many each finite quantities _can_ be finite.
Paradox: why do you drive on a parkway and park in a driveway? :-) Seriously: given that anything divided by itself is 1, why is 0/0 undefined? Yes, I understand the basis in calculus and that f(1/x ) is a hole at x=0. Just one of those concessions we've made to make our mathmatical models work.
The Bootstrap Paradox only exists if we view time as linear. Humans experience time as linear, but that doesn't mean it isn't viewable as non-linear. The movie Arrival did a great job of showing circular time. Pretty cool stuff.
Time is a completely man made concept. We saw that this yellow circle in the sky would rise and set, then dark happens. We based the amount of time on that cycle.
Zeno’s paradox as applied to reality is actually resolvable when you consider the quantum nature of reality. The world is not continuous and therefore is not infinitely divisible. At Planck scales you reach that limit and thus the paradox falls apart. Similarly, in purely theoretical physics an object at complete rest would require infinite acceleration to begin moving. The reason we can move is that, as it turns out, everything is always moving, unless you get down to absolute zero temperature, which has never been observed. Zeno’s is an important philosophical problem, but it isn’t an issue because of how reality works.
Remember: you can always choose the Wheatley route and just go with 'False'. More in depth though: you could say that the claim that the statement is false is an attribute by using Higher Order Logic or by treating the false value as pertaining to the meta-logic of the statement, rather than the normal logic. This would be the same as saying the statement, whatever its contents are, is invalid.
Before I ever heard the expression "Bootstrap Paradox" I read a story by Robert Heinlein called By His Bootstraps, about a time traveller who goes back in time to thwart a dictatorial ruler and eventually realizes that the dictator was (will had have of be?) in fact the traveller's future self. He became the dictator in order to try to prevent the dictator existing, if you catch my drift. I assume the expression "Bootstrap Paradox" is an allusion to that story since the story is over 80 years old and I'm guessing the expression is more recent? (Also see Doctor Who... "Who wrote Beethoven's Fifth?") The Grandfather Paradox IS consistent and preserves its own limited causality if you assume a *double* loop - a figure-of-eight shaped timeline: I go back in time and kill baby Hitler, WW2 never happens, I don't go back because there's no Hitler for me to kill, baby Hitler survives, WW2 happens, I go back to kill Hitler... in the double loop Hitler alternates between existing and not existing. (Actually, what really happened was young Hitler was killed in a car accident and then rescued by a time traveller who didn't know who he was saving. True story 😉) One of the best illustration of Goedel curves for the layman that I've seen was in Brian Cox's R.I. christmas lecture in 2013... he didn't reference Goedel directly but it was all about using gravity to tilt light cones. Zeno isn't paradox, it's just semantic misdirection.
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Whats with the weird skip to a sponsor in mid sentence at 2:26
A GIFT is something you get for FREE, so a FREE GIFT is an....
Free item you get for free.
?
If I tell you my previous statement was a lie and I'm telling the truth about it then I'm telling the truth in this statement and was lying in the previous also the "who wrote Beethoven" bit in doctor who, he could of wrote it in the first place but took it too him too early and then it seems as if it wrote itself the paradox. I wonder if everything started because of a paradox the opposite of nothing is everything infinitely no start point .. no end
The Grandfather Paradox is pretty easy to solve, actually. It's just that the answer is too boring for Hollywood. The reason the killer exists is because their birth was not prevented. So either the person they killed was not actually their grandfather, or their grandfather was not killed. What makes up the present already takes the past into account, so whatever happened in the past is always what had happened and there is no "changing" the present by altering the past.
no matter the day, I have a dose of Simon and his deep dive into al these amazing topics. I'm sure my family is tired of my shite. stay safe and awesome evryone, Simon, Writers, viewers!
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My favorite paradox is how my company has record profits yet doesnt have the budget to give me a raise
The solution is simple, you are not a manager
hmm i wonder why
Yours too?
Giving you a raise would eat into the profits but not giving you a raise dis-incentivizes you from being productive enough to boost the company profits...
Not a paradox, the cost of running the company also goes up every year
My favorite is the Astley Paradox:
If you ask Rick Astley for his copy of the movie Up, he cannot give it to you as he will never give you Up.
However, in doing so he lets you down. Thus creating the Astley Paradox.
😂😂😂
Naw, he just gives you ones of his extra copies.
🕺🗞
@@kyleellis1825but then he’s giving you up, which he will never do
Up is fiction and therefore a lie. He said he would never tell a lie so he actually he did not let you down. Paradox solved.
The Bootstrap Paradox reminds me of something I heard about the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race. The BBC always covered it on the radio, so there'd be a commentator telling the listeners which team was ahead at every stage. However, at one point, the Thames curved in such a way that the commentator couldn't see the boats. However, he knew an ingenious way of telling who was winning at that point: he's heard that a man whose garden was near the river had a flagpole, and he'd hoist the team colour of whichever boat was ahead at that point: dark blue for Oxford and light blue for Cambridge. The commentator could just make out the flagpole with binoculars, so he'd confidently announce who was ahead, never letting on to his audience how he knew.
This went on for many years, and finally, one year he decided to visit the man and see this famous flagpole close up. But when he got to it, it noticed something: it was impossible to see the Thames from that location. He pointed this out, and asked the man how he could tell which boat was ahead. "Oh, that's easy", he said, "I have a portable radio beside me, and I listen to the commentary on the BBC".
How would the man raise a flag when he heard it on the radio, and the radio announce it based on the flag? If both are waiting for the other, neither would act.
@@IAmUnderscore Because the flag was only for a single point in the race around a bend. There was someone in the lead prior to the bend so basically whoever was in the lead before going out of sight stayed in the lead (on radio at least) until they turned the bend back into sight.
@@snorgardark1908 No, @IAmUnderscore is correct. The announcer was NOT going by who was in the lead going into the turn. He relied solely on the visual image of the flag itself through the binoculars to determine the leader. So when the competitors approached the turn the announcer would've switched to the binos to see just a flagpole, waiting on the leading flag to be raised, while the guy at home waits on the radio announcer to tell him which to raise. It would fail immediately the first time.
This only works if neither team ever passes the other during the bend. It's not a paradox. The person raising the flag would be going off of the call the commentator last made; the positions before the bend. Otherwise, it leads to what was mentioned above. Neither acting.
He only raised the flag to tell who was in the lead and the announcer only said who was in the lead. It was not about the final outcome.
So much of this relies on actually having a Time Machine. The last time I popped down to ‘Dimensional Instabilities r Us’, they were clean out of time machines. The sales assistant suggested that as the future hadn’t happened yet, there were none to be had at any price. He did suggest that when the right bit of future had happened, time machines would then be available now and indeed at any time in the past present or future.
Talk to Mr. Adams. He's the manager at Dimensional Instabilities 'R' Us. He's the best. Doug has helped me with all kinds of paradoxical issues over the years. And if your into probability drives,, He also makes a mean cup of tea .. extra hot😉
Back order it, and it will be instantly available. :)
@@RobertRedland I find that improbable, therefore I'll allow it.
Surely the lack of evidence that a time traveler hasn't announced themselves to the world must mean time travel is never invented? Well, being able to go back in time at least.
@@casinodelongething is, lots of people have claimed to be time travelers. Just because nobody believes them doesn’t mean they didn’t do as you say
0:45 - Chapter 1 - Liar paradox
2:25 - Mid roll ads
3:45 - Back to the video
4:40 - Chapter 2 - Bootstrap paradox
7:45 - Chapter 3 - Grandfather paradox
11:00 - Chapter 4 - Zeno's paradoxes
13:40 - Chapter 5 - Unexpected hanging paradox
Bloody legend. Allegedly.
I just love Diogenes. That dude was an OG "No you're wrong and I'll explain why"- kinda dude.
Zeno claiming that motion doesn't exist and Diogenes disproving it just by walking in circles or when Plato claimed that Human is just a featherless bi-pedal, so Diogenes plucked feathers off from a chicken and just blasted it on the floor claiming how this is Plato's man in front of his students lmao
Dude was the OG troll. Hilarious as hell 🤣
In other words, proving paradoxes are just social constructs.
That reality doesn't care about the sounds we make.
I love that when Alexander the great first met him napping naked next to stoop. He stood over him and explained that he was Alexander the great and sought him out because of his notoriety and wanted to meet him and help him in any way he could.
Diogenes replied with, "Could you stand over there? You're blocking my sunlight."
STRAIGHT GANGSTER AND HARD AF
He didn’t know calculus back then but he used it well. Zeno is something of an idiot.
Zeno was hitting at something very deep but he just couldn't understand it. The mathematics wasn't there and wouldn't be there for 1500 years. That he formulated the concept of an infinite number of things adding up a finite number is a massive intellectual leap. But the idea of the infinite was beyond him so he concluded the premise of the question was invalid and therefore motion is impossible because that's all that made sense to him.
Stephen King's "November 22, 1963" is quite possibly one of the best books ever written about reverse causation. It's something I've thought about a lot and always agreed with, and Simon mentions it too in this video.
Maybe that's why there is a shooter on the knoll...because of some future time traveler attempted to stop the one shooter, that's why time had to create the 2nd. And when they attempted to stop that guy is why one of the newest theories is that the weird angle is cuz in the panic of the situation one of the secret service guys tripped and accidentally discharged the fatal bullet. 🤔 it's repairing the attempts to stop it.
just a quick game of wild suppositions...sorry. lol.
I agree. It's something I've thought about a lot. Stephen King did a great job with the concept while writing an awesome book.
On my waterfront property, 2 boat landing piers washed ashore. We never found the owners. I now have an unsolved pair a docks
That's terrible😂
Haha, I see what you did there
Thanks dad.
That's dumb... I liked it
Awful.
If you think about it, the prisoner will always be executed on the last day, his last day.
Donnie Darko
If the prisoner is told that One day this week you will be executed but not on the day that would be a surprise he would be expecting to be executed any day. The surprise would be if the execution did not happen. Therefore prisoner can not be executed becous it would be expected.
@@1tho3 Except in countries like Japan, you don't get to know what day you'll be executed until the executioner knocks on your door; yet there isn't a prison full of people who can't be executed . . .
and yet...there isn't a definition to 'ecuted'...so how do you ex-ecute somebody ;P
He will never be executed if he requests an all you can eat buffet and just keeps eating forever 😄
production feedback: Audio dynamic compression is a great move, but the compression seems to have too fast a release time (inhaled breath comes in loud), and the de-esser needs to aim for a higher frequency.
Thank goodness someone else noticed. I stopped watching after a minute because of this. So irritating listening to that breathing!
@@paulbessell6154 Yeah, I started focusing on the breathing vs the content. Weird.
Prisoner's paradox as told by Simon is actually funny double paradox. Even if the executioner came on Friday, the judge would still be right. After Thursday night, you would be sure you've won, so Friday knock would be a terrible surprise for you :D
I present to you the modern paradox.
You need experience to get the job.
You need the job to get experience.
Tada!
Clearly that is not a paradox, because then all young people would be unemployed.
@@probusexcogitatoris736 As someone with a BS in CS and has been looking for a job for over a year with not a single interview despite being top of his class because of exactly what Doom stated I can confidently say you are wrong. "Entry level position looking for a recent graduate who hasn't been employed prior. Must have: 8+ years of experience in x,y,z." This is exactly what I see, EVERY FUCKING DAY on most of the job listings for "Entry level". It doesn't matter what position, or business, they almost all have this type of bs.
@@probusexcogitatoris736it’s commentary, simmer down republican.
@@xero6912then you manufacture experience. All college activities are experience. All lab or personal project time is experience. You can do it.
What about the worlds oldest profession, supposedly prostitution. Peter Hathaway Capstick pointed out there had to be an older profession in order for the prostitute to be paid. So the worlds oldest profession was probably a hunter. Dunno if thats a paradox or just deep thinking.
Those inhalations are strong and sharp. Is he fighting off and talking through an asthma attack?
No it's too take in as much air in a short time to keep his pace. Microphones are a bitch for picking up moving air
@@christopherhammond9467 did you just explain breathing to me? 🤣
Yeah, it's actually quite distracting. I wonder if he is coming off some sort of health thing, which also explains why Karl Smallwood took over Biographics.
@@6thwilbury2331 that’s a thought. I was thinking it was something he developed or fell into over time and a new mic was picking it up.
@@6thwilbury2331 That has absolutely NOTHING to do with why Simon Whistler left Biographics, Geographics, and TopTenz. It was all about personal or business disagreements with the producers (the Harris family) of those 3 channels. If health had anything to do with it, then why did he never stop making videos for almost all of his other many channels?
I just noticed this guy takes loud short sharp breaths inbetween every sentence and now i cant get passed it. My gift to you
There's more to it than that....
Oh yeah that’s really annoying, thanks I hate it & can’t finish the vid now
Years ago, at a science fiction convention, I purchased a button that reads, "The statement on this button is false". It is my favorite. It's even more fun when people tell me, "I don't get it". Then I have to explain to people what a paradox is. 🦆🦆
How does anyone above the age of 10 not know what a paradox is. Thats amazing.
Then you "got" to explain?
@@michaelhowell2326The pleasure of explaining things wears off quickly, then got becomes have to. There's a stage after that called figure it out yourself that op clearly hasn't reached yet. It's not that hard to Google shit.
@@levilandes1719 one doesn't wear something like a big pin unless they want it as conversation piece. If it got to the "have to" point, just take it off. And Google is no replacement for human interaction. People are losing that ability.
@@michaelhowell2326 It's a shirt, I have a bunch of t shirts with graphics that I barely pay attention to. A shirt is old to me, not to others, and their curiosity is still their problem and still not mine. Not everyone enjoys human interaction, some people are able to meet that need with minimal contact through impersonal means, such as the comment section of a TH-cam video. And other people's needs are again, their problem, not mine. I'll feed you if you're hungry, but if you want company keep marching.
My favorite paradox is how "working from home has been a great success" and yet "it's time to return to the daily commute"
That's not a paradox. That's management congratulating themselves on THEIR success managing the disposable fool- errr... employees... while they worked at home, but now, management wants to manage the VALUED EMPLOYEES (remembered to use the polite word that time) at work, because it's more convenient for management.
Quit and start your own business. Come and go as you please. Until then get back to work scrub.
Not at all a paradox. Did you write this three seconds into the video/after hearing of paradoxes? This is a contradiction.
@@PremIndi You should learn the language better.
@@devikwolf I think you mean 'deepen my understanding of the language'. 'Learn the language better' would be in reference to the quality of my learning as I actively learn the language. I'm not learning the language, I mastered it sometime after I read my first novel at 4 y.o. Keep going cobber, you'll get there.
Thank you for pointing out the watch paradox in "Somewhere In Time". I remember having a rather ...ahh ... heated discussion with my then wife about the impossibility of the watch. She thought I was being too picky and should just "enjoyed the film". This may have been part of the reason we are no longer together.
The watch surely follows the Bounty paradox. If you had a ship called the Bounty and over the years had to swap out sails, planks, steering wheel and so on, would that still be the ship? How would it be if you took the swapped out parts and built a ship with them. Which ship is the original Bounty?
But if your ex-wife differs that much, it would show on other ends, too. Not every marriage is built to last.
If we consider what he said in the video about time refusing to allow a paradox to exist, then it's likely that somewhere along the way the original watch gets swapped out for one like it, so the same watch isn't going through time over and over. Like she gives him the watch, a pickpocket mugs him and swaps the watch with a cheap knock-off without him realizing, he goes back in time and gives it to her, she carries it all those years, gives it to him, he's mugged and it's swapped for a cheap knock-off, etc, so it's always a "new" watch going through time. Time just sprayed some paradox-be-gone on the watch. :)
I think you're thinking of the Ship of Thesues @@migga86
The answer to the dichotomy paradox always seemed so obvious to me. The idea that you have to take an infinite number of steps to cover a finite distance inherently presupposes that you have to "arrive" at each halfway point and stop there before continuing on meaning that, at some point, for some arbitrary reason you have to start taking smaller and smaller 'steps' so that you don't pass the next halfway point without stopping and counting a new step. There is no reason to do that other than to satisfy the artificial restriction imposed by the wording of the paradox.
Another version of this would be filling a cylindrical bucket from hose with a constant stream of water. If the bottom to the top of the bucket is thought of as equivalent to the distance run by the runner in the dichotomy paradox, the water could only satisfy the requirements of the paradox if you stoo the flow of water as you go along each time you hit the next halfway point, but then you are denying the initial condition that I mentioned that you are filling the bucket with a constant flow from a hose. The fact that we observe time flowing and have not actually figured out a way of stopping it indicates that this type of paradox simply doesn't describe the reality we live in so it is a mathematical/philosophical curiosity but not something that describes anything we see I'm the real world such as motion through space.
Fry did the nasty in the past-y.
Verily🤣
“Did ya ever get the feeling you're only going with girls 'cause you're supposed to?”
Verily, and that past nastification is what shields him from the Brain Spawn
Are you talking about Stephen Fry?!
_How do you like_ *_THESE_* _cookies_ .. _Sugar?_
Bootstrap paradox happens quite often in technical analysis. It's a method to predict the future price of a stock by looking at the patterns in the stock price. For example, if it forms a "head and shoulders" pattern or a "cup and handle" pattern, those indicate that it will increase in price. If you buy in as a result of these patterns and the expected increase in price, you disrupt the patterns and change the predicted future of the stock.
The more people who buy when those patterns appear, the stronger the predictive value - it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
All these paradoxes can be solved by understanding just two simple premises:
1. Lies exist
2. Time travel doesn’t
This is probably the most logical comment here... and thus, is ignored.
⚠️Warning the following text is a joke⚠️
But it could. What if someone went back in time and prevented time travel from ever existing?
@@gunner_melon445 - OMG! You just stopped me from killing my grandfather.
@@markgearing 😂
The surprise paradox ceases to be a paradox because, if you accept the premise of the prisoner's logic, Not being hanged becomes a possibility. This means that even being hung on the Friday becomes a surprise.
I love the stories about how sassy Diogenes was, even if some likely never actually happened.
Knowing Diogenes, it most certainly did happen😂
Dresden Files had a funny retort to the Grandfather paradox
Harry: So if I go back in time to kill my grandfather
Vadderung: he beats you senseless I suspect
Less commentary on the paradox and more Vadderung being one of the few who knows who Harry's granddad is, but still :D
Eating an entire pizza is one task, no matter how many slices you cut it into. Running a journey with an end point is one task no matter how many times you want to divide it up.
Would not that runner's foot and or stride would be the limiting factor in the number of divisions one could make along his path?
The sum of an infinite sequence can be a finite number. Once we proved this mathematically it showed the logical fallacy in Zeno's idea. Zeno assumed that the sum of an infinite sequence must be infinity. See numberphile for surprisingly easy to understand examples.
@@philwood5288 the easist example is a joke.
an infinite number of mathematicians go into a bar.
the 1st order 1 pint, the second orders 1/2 of a pint, the 3rd orders 1/4 of a pint, the 4th orders 1/8 of a pint
the barman pours 2 pints and tells them they should know their limit
This is the best explanation that I have seen for visualizing the apparentparadox, though the fundamental error of Zeno's analysis is disregarding that each step becomes shorter in time as it becomes shorter in distance. That is the analysis that gives rise to the mathematical concept of limits.
The steps or yards the runner walks may be divided down, but at some point, the size of the division becomes so small, that he just steps over it.
This is also why animation in computers has traditionally had a 1% breaker. The amount of computing power needed to animate beyond that point far exceeds the visible capabilities, so the end of any animation is always a jump we don't see as one.
As a mathematical physicist of 8 years, I find none of these that mind blowing. Paradoxes arise from a simple lack in understanding of something somewhere along the line.
With regard to the Lair's Paradox, it seems the true value of a statement isn't always to be found in it but might rely on the web of statements in which it's found/embedded. Wittgensteinian-like.
Wow, when I was 8 years old I couldn't do simple math!!
Well yes, when intentionally manipulating something like a language or equation to break logic then the only thing that statement is making is that language is not perfect method of defining logical statements.
Still useful to know.
It was just someone with poor hand writing. It's really
"this State Men tis falsetto."@@phrontifugist
@@kyleellis1825No, it was just taken out of context. The previous page ended with "So by the aforementioned reasoning I can only come to one conclusion:" and the next page read: "This statement is false." Feels bad, when people assume you're a great philosopher yet all you did was forget to throw the last page of a script into the bin as well.
Here's a paradox. I pay to not watch ads on TH-cam. Yet I have to always watch ads on TH-cam.
Regarding the Dichotomy Argument, that reminds me of something I read that relates. A mathematician and (I believe it was) an engineer are put in a room with a beautiful woman and told that they can have their way with her. But they can only approach her every 5 minutes by halving the distance to her. The mathematician storms out saying it's impossible because he'd never reach her. The engineer stays saying eventually he'd be close enough for all practical purposes.
In your example, the distance is halved every time but the duration is always the same (5 minutes), that means the speed is halved too every time so it tends to 0. The mathematician will never be able to reach the woman (in theory at least, because in physics the Planck length seems to be the smallest bit of space possible).
In the Dichotomy Argument, both the distance and the duration are halved so the speed remains the same, which means it will take a finite amount of time to run a finite total distance.
The speeding up and cutting is making your breathing in so prominent
Yes. It gets very distracting.
I though it was just me- it is unusually loud in this one
Is that what's causing it?
I was doing P.A. announcing just a few days ago. I had run across the field to get a pronunciation on a name, then ran back to the box about 20 seconds before I had to start talking. Almost certainly sounded just like Simon does in this video.
I came to the comments to make sure it wasn't just me! Thank you for the validation.
Ok, glad I'm not the only one that noticed it.
Years ago the tax service I used for my business would send me a huge packet of paperwork. Quad duplicate everything. For a one man business. THIS PAGE HAS BEEN INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK. So is the page actually blank?
Simon's new channel: The Whistler Zone
What timing - I was writing a friend today about a restaurant they recommended named Burger Paradox. Because I'm such a nerd, I wrote "...What's the paradox of the burger? Do you bite into said burger and taste a taco, or something? Does the sheer deliciousness defy logic and reason? Do you show up to eat, then finish AS you arrive?"
So the time travel stuff, from a nonlinear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff?
Too much Dr Who for you young lady.
Alons-y! Doctor Who is actually where I first learned about the bootstrap paradox
@@43bigstevePeter Capaldi and Mozart?
That sentence got away from you.
@@Chris-hx3om yep, that’s the one!
Xeno's Paradox is based on a mistake in thinking. That mistake is attempting to smuggle the concept of infinity into a definitely finite realm. In any case, you CAN'T keep diving the remaining distance "infinitely." You can do it a mind-numbingly large number of *finite* times, but you can NEVER do it an *infinite* amount of times, since you can always do it once more, which renders the whole exercise rather pointless.
So, you're only ever going to diving the remaining distance a *finite* number of times, for a *finite* distance, where the runner/ arrow/ etc, travels a fixed, *finite* distance with each step/ over each arbitrary time period. Since all our variables here are *finite* we can represent them with numbers. However, infinity is NOT a number, it's a concept (it's another mistake in thinking to assume that infinity is a number, or that we can achieve infinity in any way) and so it fails to interact meaningfully with any of the variables. It's like trying to multiple the number 3 by the concept of justice; it produces no meaningful results.
Man it's funny I was rambling to my Mom the other day about a version of one of Zeno's paradoxes (the arrow paradox) because it was used to explain asymptotes to me by my honestly amazing Algebra 2 teacher. I had that lesson over a decade ago but it still sticks with me! Took me some time but when my brain finally connected how asymptotes and limits worked together it made infinite limits much easier for me to wrap my head around. There must be some miss information out there because my Algebra 2 teacher said the arrow paradox was debunked by Diogenes firing an arrow and it ya know... hitting the target. Or maybe he was using some creative liberties!
Time travel is obviously not possible, or someone would have stopped the Kardashians from being born....
Or they did go back in time but couldn't stop them being born because they didn't stop them being born
WOWO HAHAHHHAHA YOU ARE SO FUNNY !!! HAHAHAHSHS WOW
If there will ever be time machines there have always been time machines.
My favorite thing about this channel is how everyone acts like they're smart in the comments. And then leaves their Google account settings to public so you can see their history. And see the truth. 😅
Disappointed in the absence of the Astley Paradox. He cannot give you his copy of "Up," thereby letting you down.
Regarding which came first, "The Chicken or the Egg" paradox/problem of causality, there is a possible resolution. I think this problem/paradox can be solved by substituting the Chicken with a Horse and Donkey, and the Egg with a Mule. By doing this, the direction of causality can be established, and should hold true for other characters or similar scenarios. This is because a Mule is the offspring of a Horse and Donkey, and not the other way around.
As far as I can tell, Paradoxes typically have a hidden fallacy masquerading as a truth, thus setting up an unresolvable quandary.
It's also the egg in the sense that eggs existed millions of years before birds, and the egg that hatched the first chicken was not laid by a chicken (they're a hybrid species of two Indian Junglefowl) very much in the same way that neither parent of the mule was a mule.
The egg was laid by an evolutionary pre-chicken and it mutated enough to be the final nugget leading to chickendom...
@@chezsnailez Looks like it lead to "chickendoom." 😉
…exactly. They are simply a series of words in a nonsensical order that the “big brains” attempt to “solve.” Too funny.
What laid the pre-evo chicken, what laid that, what laid that, back to the first cellular life form. Which came first, the microbe or the clone?
An episode of Doctor Who posited the Bootstrap Paradox where the world suddenly doesn't know about Beethoven. The Time Traveler travels back in time with all of Beethoven's works and teaches him (Beethoven) how to play his own music. Beethoven passes the work off as his own and makes no mention of the Time Traveller.
Not quite. In the explanation the time travellers wants the music sheets to be signed by Beethoven. But there is no Beethoven at all. So the time traveler publishes Beethoven's music himself and basically becomes Beethoven.
A favourite of mine: You assert that time travel is real, you boast/brag whatever. Then pick your stooge. Say to them that you can prove Time travel exists and when you do, they have to buy you a drink. Once agreed tell the truth "If time travel doesnt exist, how do we get older?"
Then enjoy your drink.
The point is, when we talk about Time Travel, people assume going back in time to see/do something or jumping forward in time in order to gwin something, such as see the first manned mission to mars land or see if mankind does move to another planet or whatever. We dont talk about what time it is.
Nice. 😆 We are all traveling through time at 1 second per second.
It's not that time travel isn't possible, and indeed we _all_ time travel whenever we change our motion (eg "the faster you move through space the slower you move through time"). Indeed, travelling into the future doesn't create _any_ issues whatsoever (Einsteins "twins paradox" is _not_ a paradox!), it's only travelling into the past that is problematic.
Time doesn't exist, so time travel is meaningless. We have a flawed perception of reality that makes us believe time exists, when in fact there is no such thing as time.
Einstein's theory of relativity suggests the universe is a static, four-dimensional block that contains all of space and time simultaneously - with no special “now”. The future to one observer is the past to another. That means time doesn't flow from past to future, as we experience it. Time is an illusion.
Thanks Simon, Is there any thing no matter how difficult, that this man cannot explain and make perfectly understandable.
Pinocchio says "my nose will now grow"
*the universe implodes*
It just wouldn’t grow. Pinocchio is not lying with this statement, he’s simply wrong. Being wrong isn’t lying.
Just a couple of thoughts for some of the paradoxes
Bootstrap paradox: when you travel back in time to give anything, information or something physical or a physical interaction, you become the source of the change, and when you go back to the future, it's not how you left it. I understand the paradoxical change implied by who started the closed loop, but the loop became open once you introduced yourself to it. Opening the loop allows for many variations to occur, one of them being that Einstein had the knowledge from the start, but you going back to give him his book didn't teach him about relativity, it just put his thoughts into print.
Zeno's paradox: we have an endpoint. If we walk a mile, we know our endpoint. We can divide the endpoint down infinitely, but that doesn't change that we will reach it sometime during our travel. Granted, adding fractions along every step mathematically wont give us a 1:1, but that doesn't change the outcome of us walking a mile.
who ever thought up these ideas was smoking some crack while thinking about this stuff
Yep, most of them involve time travel or just semantics, and are therefore not practical or even possible to test.
If they developed the paradox long before crack was invented, then they couldn't have been smoking crack in order to create said paradox. Though you might be able to find a chain of events between the birth of the paradox leading to the creation of crack. Then you could take that crack back in time to have them smoke it in order to develop the paradox that would then lead to the creation of crack and begin the cycle anew. Ironically, creating yet another paradox.
When I was eight, I asked my babysitter why I couldn't pick myself up.
I knew I couldn't, I understood that experientially, I was just trying to work through the logical semantics....
There's an episode of Doctor Who that goes over the boot strap paradox
"It's the Boot Strap paradox, google it"
Peter Capaldi doing a good job explaining it. 😁
- "I did not know what I should gift you for your birthday. So, I travelled to the future and had a look."
- "Oh cool, a pair of socks... and a paradox!"
Regarding the running paradox: at some point, each of the two parts of the divided space will be less than the length of the runner's foot, which automatically means that he has completed the task and moves on to the next one, thus the entire distance is covered.
Sigh. Try spreading your arms out wide and then bringing them in by halves as if going to clap your hands together... No overlap there.
@@simesaid you're assuming my hands have 0 width
Life lesson. If a man says he is lying, you can’t trust him. Same rules as in Scream 4. To quote Sidney, “if you can’t trust him don’t open the door.” If Scream isn’t your franchise then maybe Dune when the Baron killed the Doctor. You can’t trust traitor. Crumbled paper can’t be perfect again so if a man says he’s lying. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not because trust is gone.
Two minutes in and my smooth brain hurts already
To answer the zeno paradox involving running a mile, the issue stands that eachnchalleng/task is viewed as if it was the same volume as the previous task. Running a 16th of a mile is not the same as running a 30th, rather you run 2 30ths of a mile to run a 16th. Through everyday life you are solving an infinite number of tasks all to solve one task, if you pick up a toy you are doing one task but are also picking up 4 quarters of the same object. This isnt a paradox but rather an understanding of the fact we are made of an infinite number of parts capable of each solving their own tasks. 1/4 of your hand can lift say 4 rocks, and so on.
I believe the grandfather paradox is truly not a paradox but misunderstood. If I were to go back in time to kill my grandfather I will always be foiled because I exist. No matter how many times I try he will survive because I exist in the future and energy can not be erased once it exists. So my grandfather will always survive my attempts and/or I will be stopped from trying every single time.
What if it’s not a paradox because it hinges on time travel being possible which to our limited knowledge is not.
@@vali3033 I don’t believe time travel will ever exist. Just because the equations say it’s possible doesn’t mean in practice it can be achieved. Even if you could send atoms into the future for a few seconds or into the past it won’t translate to humans being able to.
Bloody well done, Simon ‼️
How you got through all of that without tripping up, is a paradox of its own 😊❤
Why was the cat not being alive or dead, Schrödinger not being my favourite chap, not included?
Only pure secularists cannot solve these paradoxes.
Only a pure theist could say such a thing.
Let me guess: JESUS DID IT
No thanks, I have a mind
One of my favorite lines from a video game.
"History abhors a paradox."
(This statement is true (+) x is true (+)) = true (+)
(This statement is true (+) x is false (-))= false (-)
(This statement is false (-) x is true (+)) = false (-)
(This statement is false (-) x is false (-)) = true (+)
(This statement is t or f) is the first variable. The (is t or f) part is the second variable. No matter what the second variable is it doesn’t change the first variable. They both combine to give a new answer. The self reference part is meaningless. It is no different than saying this is the number 5.
The only reason this is a paradox is because for some reason we are allowing the original statement to change. Instead of combining the statement with the response. This is equivalent to saying a=a or b therefore a can also be b. Instead of a x b = c.
A long time ago when I took a few university classes in philosophy, an acquaintance told me 'philosophy is just mental masturbation'. These paradoxes reminded me of that and boy, was he right!
Tripped out. Regarding the Xeno paradox, I believe the answer is simple: there aren't infinite subdivisions of space to traverse, there's only a finite number of Planck length segments. The paradox statement itself contains a factual error.
The Planck length is a _hypothesised_ limit of knowable distance... It doesn't mean that space _isn't_ continuous.
@@simesaidIndeed, however, my understanding is that the pixelated nature of spacetime is fairly certain at this point, but of course not an absolute certainty as you point out.
@@simesaid Electrical charge, energy, light, angular momentum, and matter are all quantized. Given that distance is just a measurement of the space between 2 things, it kind of follows that distance is also quantized. It would make no sense to talk about the distance between 2 photons that are next to each other as that doesn't exist. You can't be 1/2 a photon away.
As a mathematician, this one amused me. See, math is logicism. That's why we include logic symbols. Unfortunately, nobody learns anything beyond arithmetic. Math is used to evaluate logic. In fact, it's a language used for that purpose. That's where we get concepts that many will recognize like 'proofs'. You're proving the logic of the statement.
Also, I fuckin' love Zeno. He had more than one paradox but we only ever talk about the one.
Comic book logic actually seems very logical to me. The universe itself isn’t thinking of ways to prevent the paradox but say if you went back in time to kill your grandfather, then you wouldn’t exist to go back in those to kill your grandfather. So the only universe to exist would be one in which your grandfather never had you as a grandson. Or you died before the act could be committed. Or you just never decide to commit the act. Or any other thing that prevented you from doing it. So any action you took to change the past would be futile because it is self correcting. I think that’s what the Avengers Endgame writers had in mind when they said they had to return the stones to the moment they were taken from. Although they did change the past when they let Loki escape, that changed the past. So I think if we ever invented time travel we would have unlimited historical knowledge but no way to change it.
If a problem or question has an answer that causes you to go in a infinite loop then it is not a paradox, it is a logic knot.
Paradoxes are impossibilities, imagine if someone gave you a math problem and you got the answer 2=7. You think to yourself, “I must of made a mistake” so you look over the problem and can’t find a mistake. So you redo the entire the problem but slower but you get 2=7. Confused you get a smart person, a proper mathematician and he goes through the same issue, 2=7 and there is no mistakes made and there is nothing wrong with the equation. That is a paradox 2=7.
But… Bootstrap Logic-knot doesn’t sound as cool as Bootstrap Paradox
There is also Conundrums which are problems/questions that can have a answer that is both correct and incorrect at the same time.
The surprise hanging paradox: He eliminated all 5 days and was hung anyway, that's the surprise.
Thats what he said in the vid. Surprised?
I'll ref. FUTURAMA myself: "The instant this random number generator reaches zero, you'll be executed."
I once read an article about studies that were done about studies. Those studies revealed that many studies are either forged, done with a bias or made very unprecisly and that people give studies too much value. I was a stoner back then and really high and i couldn't handle it. "If i believe a study that tells me many studies are wrong than...." 😃
So I actually have hypothetical solutions to most of these paradoxes; I know there's some hubris in that claim, but bear with me.
The Liar's Paradox: "This statement is false" and variants. To solve this, I contend that every statement includes an implied assertion of truth; "The sky is blue" is really "It is true that the sky is blue," but applied to all statements. (Technically, it also includes a lot of other assertions of truth; that there is a sky, that the color blue exists, et cetera and so forth.) If we make explicit the assertion of truth in the liar's paradox we're left with "It is true that this statement is false." This is simply self-contradictory, and we can disregard attempting to determine if a self-contradictory statement is true or false. If I tell you "8 is greater than 9, but 9 is greater than 8" then it's pretty easy to find the contradiction in my own statement. It doesn't matter if one half of the statement is correct and the other is incorrect (or if they're both incorrect!), they cannot both be correct.
Grandfather/Bootstrap Paradoxes: Both of these are rooted in time travel, and they both have the same resolution. Under all circumstances humans have experienced thus far, we move forward in time, and causality generally makes sense. If I throw a ball, the ball will go forward until air resistance and gravity pull it to the ground, or it hits another object. However, I contend that causality is by nature *only* forward-facing in time; there is no such thing as a cause creating an effect earlier in time than itself. This means that time travel is either impossible or it requires a breach of causality to even occur, and in such breach is the resolution to the paradox. From the time travelers perspective, the cause is "I turned on the time machine" and the effect is "I appeared in the past," but that's only from the traveler's perspective. I say that the appearance of the time traveler in the past actually becomes, from the universe's perspective, an "uncaused effect." It doesn't have a cause for the purposes of causality; it just happens. This means that no matter what is done in the past, it cannot effect the time traveler's arrival, even if the time traveler prevents themselves from creating time travel for any reason. The use of the time machine has already broken causality and the time traveler will appear in the past. (Bonus points: This explains the Big Bang! Time travelers did it, creating an uncaused effect that started the universe. Will time travelers in our future go back and start the Big Bang? It doesn't matter! The effect that caused the Big Bang has become a universal truth.)
Zeno's Paradoxes: I think that Zeno actually simply proved that the universe is, on some level, digital/binary rather than truly analog. All of his paradoxes rely on the concept that you can cut a given measurement in half *infinitely*. However, they are defeated by simply postulating a non-analog universe. If there is, on some incredibly tiny level, either a discrete measurement of distance or a discrete measurement of time that cannot be subdivided, then Zeno's paradoxes resolve themselves. Lets call these hypothetical discrete measurements "hypometers" and "hyposeconds." Remember that these are incredibly tiny and any measurement would require several layers of scientific notation to measure, but they mean that, at some point, in order to move two hypometers you need to move one hypometer, and there is no such thing as a half-hypometer. You either move the hypometer or do not. So you move one hypometer, and then you move the second hypometer, on and on and on a nearly-infinite number of times until you move one regular meter. The same goes for hyposeconds; either you are moving during a given hyposecond or you are not. If you are moving, then you will proceed whatever distance during one hyposecond, and there will be a finite and measurable (but truly gargantuan) number of hyposeconds before you reach the destination. These are easy to think about for those of us who use computers; your monitor refreshes only so many times per second, each time with a single discrete frame and if that number is high enough it appears to create fluid motion even though it is indeed a series of still images. So a hyposecond would be one "frame" of the universe itself, and a hypometer would be one pixel. But instead of 60 frames per second on a 1920x1080 monitor, this is googols^googols of frames per second on a googols^googols x googols^googols x googols^googols of three dimensional "pixels." Does this also prove that our universe is a simulation on someone else's bigger binary computer? Eh, maybe.
Xenos paradox can be solved by adding a metric tensor to the halving function that represents the plank length as its quanta. Halving is nothing but a function and doesn’t seek to terminate. But for the math to apply in the real world there’s needs to be a metric tensor overlayed consisting of the plank length relative to the casual extent of each “point”. The plank length alone stops the infinite loop as you can only half the mile until the plank limit. But then this is furthered by each participant (Achilles, tortoise) having an area of effect beyond the described point isn’t considered in the equation. So you need variable for points and a tensor that applies the plank length as a limit on the original distance. Also in the original problem the halving function is impossible to factor without a time metric because there tortoise isn’t static at any point but slowly advancing. There half way mark is changing at a rate that has to be divided into individual time stamps to consider a real number for half way.
For more on the liar paradox, Russell's paradox, Zeno's paradox, and Gödel's incompleteness theorem I recommend reading "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas Hofstadter.
This was so fun 😊 I've heard of many of these previously, but the in-depth commentary was fascinating!
You have an innate talent for holding the viewers' attention, no matter the subject t matter.
REALLY enjoy this channel!
9:14 In Jurassic Park, Jeff Goldblum explains chaos theory by dripping water unto Laura Dern’s hand and the drops take different paths. My idea about the “comic book logic” prevention theory is that each cycle of ‘grandfather dying - you not being born - grandfather living - you being born and going back in time’ plays out differently each time. Eventually a random chance will prevent you killing him (such as him dying in an unrelated accident before having any children), and this becomes what always happened
I have always taken the phrase "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" as being emotional, not physical. You've had a failure, you're feeling down, blue useless etc. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps! Or, to use a more recent phrase, "suck it up, buttercup" or a slightly older phrase "get over it". Let go of what has you feeling down, perk up and move on!
Predestination is one of my favorite movies and was a great representation of a Bootstrap Paradox. Recently too Bodies and a more popular show Dark. All utilize the paradox really well.
You must separate reality from language. Language describes reality, not itself. "This statement is false" twists inexperienced human brains to force language into acting on itself, a recipe for confusion. Similar conundrums are, "this egg is not an egg," or, "I don't exist."
But the Zeno's paradox is easy to dispel if you consider time to be a factor. If you assume a constant speed for the completion of the distance then the time for a part of this is going to equal the overall time divided by the length of the sub distance. Thus 1/2 the distance = 1/2 the time, 1/4 distance = 1/4 time etc. So although technically you can subdivide the distance into infinity then the time would subdivide the same amount until an infinite subdivision would equal 0 time.
2:08 I am perfectly willing to dismiss it as nonsensical. I also firmly believe that time loops break causality, because causality can be applied both on the microscopic scale (single events) and the macroscopic scale (groups of events). If a time loop is viewed as a macroscopic event, it has no cause, and thus breaks causality. The only ways around this are to imply a progression of timelines (time itself experiencing time, which would then fall victim to the same reasoning and necessitate the existence of an infinite hierarchy of "time"s, which is itself paradoxical or otherwise outside the bounds of logic) or to assert that the universe was originally set up deterministically so that no time travel would ever create a time paradox, which in its turn necessitates the existence of a timeless intelligence to cause the universe to be set up in such a way, which yet again forces us into a conclusion outside the bounds of causality.
G'day Simon,
One of my favourite shirts says...
"I'm Confused, No Wait... Maybe I'm Not" 😁 I love wearing it
I don’t approve this message👍🏾
12:00 this paradox description leaves out an important factor: each of the infinite number of tasks would take an infinitely small amount of time. So, you end up with ∞/∞ -- in this case since it can be rightly assumed both infinities would be equally large as they derive from the same linear subdivision, the conclusion would be there is no influence on the time taken overall as the resulting factor would be equal to 1, exactly.
Zeno paradoxes were a pillar of my college metaphysics professor’s proof for the existence of a god. When he presented the paradox I was also taking calculus, and for my paper at the end of the semester I had to take a stance and either support or dispute all of the major topics we had covered.
I plotted the distance velocity and time in such a way to show that for a given velocity it was impossible for the runner to take longer than the time dictated by their velocity (infinite addition to a finite sum). He said I wasn’t allowed to do that because math and philosophical arguments are different. Still got an A though so I guess it’s ok.
I’ve always been bothered by Zeno’s Paradox. It says, “that which is in locomotion must arrive at the halfway point before it arrives at its goal.” Then, for no reason other than to serve the creation of a paradox, it basically keeps shifting the start of the journey upon clearing the halfway point. I know that math/physics solutions based on the limits of time divisions have been provided, but that’s not my issue.
My problem is that a traveller doesn’t hit ‘reset’ on their goal when they reach the halfway point. If they start and end a journey in motion, all that can be claimed by Zeno’s Paradox is this:
“In order to reach a destination, anything set in motion must pass the halfway point.”
Zeno's paradoxes are fascinating. I believe that they prove that space and time are discrete.
I am only on the 1st paradox and i have it paused just staring at the wall. Our dog is 14 and lost his best friend 8 or 9 months ago to cancer.. our MollyBird. Broke my heart.. and he hasn't been the same since.. and he has been diagnosed with Cognitive Dissonance specifically it is Sundowner's for dogs. The Vet put him on some medications recently that have helped him and the "episodes" i guess aren't as severe or frequent and that has made me happy.. so for the most part he is a lot better but sometimes he will just stand there and stare at the wall for 20 mins and i will walk over and ask him what exactly are you pondering there?? I think he ponders the liars paradox. I know that it has broken my brain for the night and it's just the first one.
My favourite paradox is a man with a full beard and moustache is telling you how good Tiege Products are when no face skin can be easily seen.
The grandfather paradox is actually easy. It's simply a 4 step bootstrap paradox. Step one go back in time, step two do the thing, step three you now cannot/do not go back in time, step the fourth the reason you go back in time still happens.
that was a really interesting summary, thanks Simon. :)
I've always been a fan of The Grandfather Paradox, but I've also always believed that from your perspective (being the one who traveled back in time), nothing would really change... not because of any crazy correcting force intended to "balance the scales", but simply because by traveling through time, you would disconnect yourself entirely from the timeline that you left. this would create a branch in time at the historic point you arrived at, and you would continue your own progression through that new timeline instead.
the timeline that resulted in you being born, is technically still in your own personal past. so, no.. I don't think that going back in time to kill your own grandfather would cause you to suddenly cease to exist.
I suppose it might suffice to say: "time is relative to the person experiencing it".
Time loops you're talking about reminds me of Harry Potter in the Prisoner of Azkaban. He says "I knew I could do it because I had already done it," when referencing how he was able to cast such a powerful patronus charm.
The Liar's Paradox is not a Paradox in certain multivalued logics.
For example, a third value can be Unknown, which can be True, False, Both, Neither, or none of those, but which it is cannot be determined.
Fuzzy Logic also bypasses this Paradox. The Truth value here is a continuum, so the Liar statement can have a percentage truth value, which automatically adjusts based on the statement, such that the alternate formulations don't create a paradox.
The unexpected hanging can be reduced to a single day or have the prisoner executed on the last day and still have the same effect. Unexpected here is "you cannot come up with a logical deduction that you will be hanged on the day before the hanging"
The prisoner deduces that he cannot be hanged on the single remaining day. Therefore the actual hanging is a surprise.
It turns out that there is a flaw even in the very first step. Deducing that you will be unexpectedly hanged on the next day is impossible.
If you can deduce you will be hanged, then you will not be hanged.
If you will not be hanged, you cannot deduce you will be hanged.
This is a situation where you cannot make any valid deduction about whether you will be hanged.
And so the hanging is slways unexpected.
Motion IS impossible. Motion is a concept of going from point a to point b through time
But time can not be divided any further than the plank length.....since there is no half plank length, movement through time can not occur from one plank to the next, it is a jump from one plank to the next....hence, no motion is actually taking place
I always like thinking of the time travellers paradox as the time traveller is travelling to differing versions of time: A1) Einstein invents relativity ->A2) get in time machine with theory of relativity and go back in time-> B1) You teach Einstein the theory of relativity and go back to your time->B2) Einstein has published the theory of relativity under his own name. This way, the theory has a point of origin just in a different timeline
With the surprise hanging paradox, I wonder if it's possible that the judge had some knowledge that would mean that if he was to word the hanging in the way he did, the prisoner might come to the conclusion that he did?
Meaning that the judge explained things as you mentioned leaving the prisoner to conclude the logic he came up with yet the Judge still clearly picking a day for the hanging and there in lies the surprise.
The prisoner thought he had some sound knowledge but the judge makes a somewhat random selection of the day causing the surprise in the prisoner.
Just a thought!
At school our teacher told us we would have a surprise quiz somewhere next week. I told him it couldn't be on a Friday and explained why, then someone else chimed in that it also couldn't be on Thursday then... when we arrived at the final conclusion the math teacher explained this paradox to us. I love math and logic!
Most of the "paradoxes" we encounter have at least one tremendous fault within their logic & are only declared as "paradoxes" due to the lack of understanding.
For example:
1) The whole "This statement is false" is entirely irrelevant because it is only concerning an isolated perspective and is entirely self-referential. Beyond the context of that specific sentence, nothing else is affected in any way. Because of this, it doesn't matter whether the statement is actually true OR false, it only exists within the scope of its own defined terms. The same could easily be said of the "Bootstrap Paradox."
2) Many other so-called "paradoxes" arise from a limited understanding of the object's fundamental premises. Here, we get to examples like "how did the universe begin; how was everything created from nothing?" Although they are phrased as questions here, their answers lie somewhere between our current understanding. This also applies to the seemingly paradoxical nature of entangled quantum particles. There's a determined relationship between the particles, it's just that we have not yet found the bit of info that inextricably binds said particles which embroils us into frenzied debates on the nature of reality.
There can be things which seem mutually exclusive, yet are not. There are things where a limited understanding of more fundamental behaviors leads us to conclude that both contradict the other. And there are things which are self-referential and/or have circular logic. All of these are phenomena that arise from our own ignorance and hubris.
The Darren Shan saga gave a good example for grandfather paradox
It’s going into the past won’t stop the events only delay until someone else completes the act for why the person goes back
Grandfather paradox can absolutely be accomplished. If in your future time travel becomes possible you go back kill him and you are never born, but time travel still gets made, just without your grandfather of your dad or you. It can only happen once but that's all that's needed to fulfill.
the problem with Zenos paradox as the video stated is the division of distance. a normal person won’t shrink with the each division just like they won’t be able to take a single 1/2 mile step. so while you might be able to fit an absurd amount of delineations into that [30inch] step, the step itself is what should be measured
11:00 f
Zeno's locomotion paradox is a bad example for unsolvable paradoxes: He actually argues that a sum of
▪︎infinitely many and
▪︎each finite
timespans could not be finite. By this time he already has split _a finite distance_ into
▪︎infinitely many
▪︎each finite
distances, thus _proving himself_ that a sum of infinitely many each finite quantities _can_ be finite.
Paradox: why do you drive on a parkway and park in a driveway? :-) Seriously: given that anything divided by itself is 1, why is 0/0 undefined? Yes, I understand the basis in calculus and that f(1/x ) is a hole at x=0. Just one of those concessions we've made to make our mathmatical models work.
The Bootstrap Paradox only exists if we view time as linear. Humans experience time as linear, but that doesn't mean it isn't viewable as non-linear. The movie Arrival did a great job of showing circular time. Pretty cool stuff.
Time is a completely man made concept. We saw that this yellow circle in the sky would rise and set, then dark happens. We based the amount of time on that cycle.
Zeno’s paradox as applied to reality is actually resolvable when you consider the quantum nature of reality. The world is not continuous and therefore is not infinitely divisible. At Planck scales you reach that limit and thus the paradox falls apart.
Similarly, in purely theoretical physics an object at complete rest would require infinite acceleration to begin moving. The reason we can move is that, as it turns out, everything is always moving, unless you get down to absolute zero temperature, which has never been observed.
Zeno’s is an important philosophical problem, but it isn’t an issue because of how reality works.
Remember: you can always choose the Wheatley route and just go with 'False'.
More in depth though: you could say that the claim that the statement is false is an attribute by using Higher Order Logic or by treating the false value as pertaining to the meta-logic of the statement, rather than the normal logic. This would be the same as saying the statement, whatever its contents are, is invalid.
Before I ever heard the expression "Bootstrap Paradox" I read a story by Robert Heinlein called By His Bootstraps, about a time traveller who goes back in time to thwart a dictatorial ruler and eventually realizes that the dictator was (will had have of be?) in fact the traveller's future self. He became the dictator in order to try to prevent the dictator existing, if you catch my drift. I assume the expression "Bootstrap Paradox" is an allusion to that story since the story is over 80 years old and I'm guessing the expression is more recent? (Also see Doctor Who... "Who wrote Beethoven's Fifth?")
The Grandfather Paradox IS consistent and preserves its own limited causality if you assume a *double* loop - a figure-of-eight shaped timeline: I go back in time and kill baby Hitler, WW2 never happens, I don't go back because there's no Hitler for me to kill, baby Hitler survives, WW2 happens, I go back to kill Hitler... in the double loop Hitler alternates between existing and not existing. (Actually, what really happened was young Hitler was killed in a car accident and then rescued by a time traveller who didn't know who he was saving. True story 😉)
One of the best illustration of Goedel curves for the layman that I've seen was in Brian Cox's R.I. christmas lecture in 2013... he didn't reference Goedel directly but it was all about using gravity to tilt light cones.
Zeno isn't paradox, it's just semantic misdirection.