The monotheistic all powerful one.
The Astley paradox.
If you ask Rick Astley for his copy of Disney Pixar’s Up, he can’t give it to you, because he’ll never give you Up. But by not doing so, you’d be let down, and he’ll never let you down.
Testing this scenario is ofc incredibly risky to the state of our reality, so the Astley paradox must remain a thought experiment.
My favorite paradox is the “Stay signed in” option Microsoft gives you when signing in. Because despite keeping you signed in on every other site in existence, Microsoft, who is usually hooked into your OS, does not. Thus, stay signed in runs contradictory to one’s expectations.
Alanis morissette’s song ironic contains no solid cases of irony, mostly bad luck or poor timing, and is therefore ironic.
I read an interview with her once that was kind of funny and humanizing. She wrote and recorded that song before she was famous and had no idea that it would ever be heard. Then it blew up and people have been giving her shit about it for decades now.
Could you imagine if you wrote a shitty Lemmy comment that became extremely viral and people were like, “you fucking moron, how could you have written something so dumb?!”
Not you got me praying I never get famous
I like George Carlin’s version: “If God is all powerful, can he make a rock so big that he himself can’t lift it?”
Weird attribution, man :) That one, and a lot of others like it, come all the way from the 12th Century and thereabouts. Carlin’s influence is awesome and deserved, but I don’t think it stretches that far :)
“Can God microwave a burrito so hot that he himself cannot eat it?”
"All of the “is infinite power so powerful that it could overpower its own power” type questions just annoy me.
Is infinite power so powerful it can do something that it can’t do?
Yes it can. And then it can do that anyway. Otherwise it wouldn’t be infinite."
So you’re saying he would wait for it to cool down before eating it?
It’s a copy pasta from another thread, just like the comment I replied to.
Yes. Yes he can. It’s only a paradox to our comprehension.
I don’t see why that’s a paradox. It’s like asking if infinity is bigger than infinity, where both infinities are aleph 0.
If there exists a place outside time, then the only way to travel there is to already be there, and if you are there, you can never leave.
The measurement of time, the measurement of the constant of change, is very different than our experience of time. For example, you never experienced a past, you experienced Now measured as the Present, just as you are currently experiencing Now measured as the Present, and will not experience the future, it will be Now measured as the Present. All you have ever experienced is a perpetual fixed Now. This is true for all of us. All measurements of time occur within a fixed Now, so we can say all time is Now.
Depending on certain spiritual views, what we call the Now is also called the “I Am”, or consciousness, or awareness, etc. This “I Am” is intangible and exists outside of time, therefore, depending on your spiritual beliefs, you are the object, existing in a place outside of time, and are already there, and have never left.
This could be assuming there’s only one timeline we’re currently inhabiting. There could be nested meta times or spacetimes encompassing the universe, leaving us in a series of overlapping Nows. Or maybe the forward passage of time and causality end up only being true locally, and in other places in the cosmos time can run in loops or backwards or not at all. In that case Now could mean different things to different observers depending where and when you are.
If Now exists outside of time, then the measurement of time weather it’s measured as a loop, forward, backward, in a spiral, etc. would have no effect on the Now. From the Now’s perspective all of time has already occurred, is occurring, and has yet to occur all at once. If Now’s position is fixed, then it would appear in multiple timelines at once, and in multiple locations at once.
Time is simply a measurement of the constant of change, which is itself a paradox, something false that continuously proves itself to be false, or something in motion that continuously keeps itself in motion. So we can say something that is false is something that is mutable and movable. Then an object that is not false, outside of the constant of change, would be immutable, in-movable, and fixed, like the Now. Time would move around it, while it remains stationary and unaffected.
The ship of Theseus.
I like the version of it from John Dies At The End. Same thought experiment just with an axe
Fermi’s Paradox. There are so many stars (more than there are grains of sand on earth), that the probablility that one of them has life, and even intelligent life, is >99% . So why haven’t we observed it yet? Cue a lot of brilliant people trying to answer that question.
The Dark Forest - no one wants to alert their presence or attract predators. Though knowing our Earth I think we’re stupid enough to do that. Cue the space lasers.
Seems like a smart move to stay silent.
It could’ve also been knowledge interstellar species gained through experience too: if in their first encounters they were either wiped out, or nearly wiped out, then they’re not going to reach out again.
The space is
REALLY
Fucking YUUUUUUGE
What you observe of the universe died a really long time ago, it’s improbable that other intelligent life in the universe can observe us and the same with us.
We could be multiple galaxies away from each other and never ever know of each other.
Space is big, light is slow, and the inverse square law is a thing. You think we’ve been pumping out radio broadcasts for hundreds of years and nobody has contacted us yet, but we’re only detectable to life within 200 lightyears if they’re specifically looking for the signals we pump out, and they’re looking exactly at us. We’ll only see a response if they decide to, and we can detect it, and we’re looking at them when their response reaches us, and we recognize that it’s a response and not a peryton.
It’s not a paradox, you just have to look at this Wikipedia page.
You’ve solved it, congrats!
Could it be that we were the only species that figured out how to communicate via radio?
The usual answer is yes, but he survives. Basically this isn’t a paradox for something actually all powerful.
In gridiron football, if a penalty is committed close enough to the end zone, instead of the normal penalty yardage, the ball is spotted half the distance to the goal (i.e. if a defender holds an offensive player and the offense is 8 yards away from the end zone, instead of being penalized the normal 10 yards they would be penalized 4). In theory, there can be an infinite amount of penalties to the point where penalties would move the ball micrometers or even shorter without the ball ever crossing the end zone.
There’s probably a name for this phenomenon, but I can’t think of it.
Zeno’s paradox. Although in reality you’ll run into problems when you need to move the ball 1/2 the Planck distance
Something like Zeno’s paradox.
I like Gödel numbering as a means of proving that it is impossible to have a complete model of logic.
I think Nietzsche already killed god decades ago. But not sure which one.
God clearly can’t exist because an omnipotent, omniscient, and just God is a paradox already. Omnipotence and omniscience means that God, if they exist, would have full control of every moment of the universe (even if they only “acted” initially). Some (I’d argue nearly all) people suffer for reasons out of their control. Only deserved suffering is just. Since undeserved suffering exists then God cannot exist (at least omniscient, omnipotent, and just - as we understand those terms). God could be an omniscient, omnipotent asshole or sadist… God could be omniscient and just (aka the martyr God who knows of all suffering but is powerless to prevent it)… or God could be omnipotent and just (aka the naive God who you could liken to a developer running around desperately trying to spot patch problems and just making things worse).
Alternatively, by omnipotent maybe the scriptures are just hyping them up - “God is so fucking buff - this one time they lifted up this rock that was like this big. Fucking amazing.”
As you said, that does depend entirely on God having those properties, exactly as you define them.
Alternatively, if definitive property is “universal consciousness”, then God clearly must exist. Either consciousness is an emergent property of sufficiently complex systems, in which case the entire universe is obviously more complex than the human nervous system and consciousness should certainly emerge within it; or, consciousness is some external field, like gravity or electromagnetism, that complex systems can channel. Either way, the existence of your own consciousness implies a universal one.
I don’t think your alternative proposal makes sense, at least not to me. An emergent property being present in one complex system doesn’t imply that it must be present in all complex systems.
What does imply it’s presence, then? The emergence of comparable effects is implied by isomorphic complexities. If you can’t define the foundational structure which implies emergence, you can only fall back on a probabilistic approach.
Unless you can define exactly what structure it is that belies the emergence of consciousness, you must acknowledge that the comparative complexity of a more complex system is undoubtedly probabilistically suggestive of at least comparable, if not far more complex, emergent behavior.
The proposition that consciousness is emergent, but only at a very specific and narrow band of complexity, falls quickly to Occam’s razor. It’s logically and probabilistically ridiculous.
My point is that not all complex systems are the same. Maybe it depends on your definition of consciousness but from what I know we have only ever observed that in a very specific set of complex systems which is brains and possibly fungi. Two different systems being complex isn’t enough in my view to infer that they would have the same properties unless there are other similarities.
It absolutely depends on your definition of consciousness. Every conversation about a concept depends on the definition of that concept. My definition is based upon sensation, processing, and decision-making, in regards to the self and the environment. I’d argue that plants and even cells exhibit simple forms of consciousness. If you take the emergent-property perspective, I’d argue even molecules and individual particles have a broad and abstract consciousness, although certainly several orders of magnitude less sophisticated than yours or mine.
The statement “we have only ever observed that in a very specific set of complex systems which is brains and possibly fungi” tells me less about consciousness than it does about our ability to observe it.
If someone believes that God can do anything, ask them if he can create a rock he can’t pick up
Trick question; Lemmy is god!
In classical logic, trichotomy on the reals (any given numbers is either >0, <0 or =0) is provably true; in intuitionistic logic it is probably false. Thanks to Godel’s incompleteness theorem, we’ll never know which is right!
