OK let's clarify. I was reading one of my books and revisited some areas of philosophy and logic that i enjoy.
Gödel, Escher, Bach (GEB) debates the question of consciousness and the possibility of artificial intelligence. It is a book that attempts to discover what “self” really means. Introducing the reader to cognitive science. This reference book discusses question #3 but for fun i threw in question 1 and 2 for good measure.
These questions are actually a paradox and therefore could have more than one answer. For example.
#1 The word A-L-P-H-A-B-E-T has 8 letters or the answer could be 26
#2 The answer could be nine birds or none. (" shooting one dosen't mean the others will fly away. But then they could.
#3 So lets look at what is called the liar paradox. I hope you find this as mentally stimulating as i did.
The problem of the paradox is that it seems to show that common beliefs about truth and falsity actually lead to a contradiction. Sentences can be constructed that cannot consistently be assigned a truth value even though they are completely in accord with grammar and semantic rules. Consider the simplest version of the paradox, the sentence This statement is false. If we suppose that the statement is true, everything asserted in it must be true. However, because the statement asserts that it is itself false, it must be false. So the hypothesis that it is true leads to the contradiction that it is true and false. Yet we cannot conclude that the sentence is false for that hypothesis also leads to contradiction. If the statement is false, then what it says about itself is not true. It says that it is false, so that must not be true. Hence, it is true. Under either hypothesis, we end up concluding that the statement is both true and false. But it has to be either true or false (or so our common intuitions lead us to think), hence there seems to be a contradiction at the heart of our beliefs about truth and falsity.
However, the fact that the liar sentence can be shown to be true if it is false and false if it is true has led some to conclude that it is neither true nor false. This response to the paradox is, in effect, to reject one of our common beliefs about truth and falsity: the claim that every statement has to be one or the other. This common belief is called the Principle of Bivalence, and is related to the law of the excluded middle.
The proposal that the statement is neither true nor false has given rise to the following, strengthened version of the paradox:
Analyzing the statement "I am lying now", if what the speaker says is true, then the statement "I am lying now" is false, that means when the statement was said, the speaker was actually lying. But then, on the contrary, if it is true that the speaker is lying, then the statement "I am lying now" is false in that the statement turns out to be true.
OBTW Thanks for the answers.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by ifly
1. The Alphabet 1=T 2=H 3=E 4=A 5=L 6=P 7=H 8=A 9=B 10=E 11=T
#1 Question How many letters in the alphabet?
2. If you shoot at 10 birds in a tree you will kill one and the other 9 will fly off unless you're a bad shot then all 10 fly off.
3. If you say everything I tell you is a lie, that would mean that statement is infact a lie, so that statement is false. it does however mean thats its recipricol, everything I tell you is true, is accurate. So, everything you say is infact true. only this particular statement is false.
Does that clarify things???
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