09 AUG 2014 by ideonexus
König’s paradox: Ordinals
Let’s start by turning back the clock. It is India in the fifth century BCE, the age of the historical Buddha, and a rather peculiar principle of reasoning appears to be in general use. This principle is called the catuskoti, meaning ‘four corners’. It insists that there are four possibilities regarding any statement: it might be true (and true only), false (and false only), both true and false, or neither true nor false. [...] To get back to something that the Buddha might recognise,...Folksonomies: mathematics paradox
Folksonomies: mathematics paradox
Also Betrand Russel's "Set of All Sets that Do Not Contain Themselves"
02 JAN 2014 by ideonexus
Ontological paradox
Because of the possibility of influencing the past while time traveling, one way of explaining why history does not change is by saying that whatever has happened was meant to happen. A time traveler attempting to alter the past in this model, intentionally or not, would only be fulfilling his role in creating history, not changing it. The Novikov self-consistency principle proposes that contradictory causal loops cannot form, but that consistent ones can. This theory, however, only makes sen...A paradox of time-travel. If a person takes information back in time and gives it to someone, who becomes the originator of that information, then where did the information originate?
09 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
Demographic-economic paradox
The demographic-economic paradox is the inverse correlation found between wealth and fertility within and between nations. The higher the degree of education and GDP per capita of a human population, subpopulation or social stratum, the fewer children are born in any industrialized country. In a 1974 UN population conference in Bucharest, Karan Singh, a former minister of population in India, illustrated this trend by stating "Development is the best contraceptive."[1] The term "paradox" com...As societies grow more developed, birthrates decrease, despite the increased resources.
11 JUN 2013 by ideonexus
Solution to Russel's Paradox
An analysis of the paradoxes to be avoided shows that they all result from a kind of vicious circle. The vicious circles in question arise from supposing that a collection of objects may contain members which can only be defined by means of the collection as a whole. Thus, for example, the collection of propositions will be supposed to contain a proposition stating that “all propositions are either true or false.” It would seem, however, that such a statement could not be legitimate unles...The paradox that a set of sets that do not contain themselves must contain itself.
21 MAY 2013 by ideonexus
Ship of Theseus Paradox
The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned [from Crete] had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.Folksonomies: philosophy paradox
Folksonomies: philosophy paradox
Is a ship that has every board and nail replaced the same ship?
23 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
Paradox of the Universe
I am afraid all we can do is to accept the paradox and try to accommodate ourselves to it, as we have done to so many paradoxes lately in modern physical theories. We shall have to get accustomed to the idea that the change of the quantity R, commonly called the 'radius of the universe', and the evolutionary changes of stars and stellar systems are two different processes, going on side by side without any apparent connection between them. After all the 'universe' is an hypothesis, like the a...It's radius VS the behavior of stars and stellar systems. Makes one think of the paradox of an expanding universe and one in which galaxies are drawn together through gravity.