= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Psychohistorian comments on Anime Explains the Epimenides Paradox - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (26)
Video may be a wee bit longer than needed to get the point across. And by wee bit, I mean you could cut 7.5 minutes off of it, and it runs for 7:40.
I've always (after a fun paper on this!) thought of this in modal terms. Self-referential statements are not truths about the world; they're truths about ill-defined universes. "This statement is false" doesn't refer to anything; it's its own little world, and consequently truth has no meaning.
Similarly, "This statement is true" really doesn't provide any information. What if it's a false statement? Is there a difference? How can we tell? It's its own self-referential world, and it's unclear what truth even means in that little world, though it's very clear that it does not make the least bit of difference in any world I care about.
I believe that's the intended point. Besides, most infinite ordinals are very much larger.
Which is funny, because a ten second clip and a ten-billion-year clip are equally close to approximating infinity.
Not in surreal numbers!
What about statements that refer both to themselves and to things in our world, such as "either this sentence is false, or Psychohistorian owes Peter de Blanc $50"?
This is also how I've always thought about self-referential statements; is there a name for this position? Is it even a position?
Modal logic, from what I remember of it, deals with "worlds" of sorts, so it might be possible to express it with modal logic; I don't remember well enough, and I certainly don't recall this being a named position. It does seem like a position, though.
There's a very pretty bagpipe line that kicks in towards the middle -- wouldn't want to miss that.
Is that the Mingulay Boat Song?