Let's solve a riddle
 

1. How many letters are in the alphabet?

2. There are 10 birds sitting on a tree, i shot one of the birds.. How many birds remains on the tree?

3. A man walks up to you and says - "everything I say to you is a lie."
Is he telling you the truth or is he lying?

1. 11

2. None, the rest were scared off by the shot!

3. He's lying. How can "everything" he says be a lie??

Hope that helps answer your questions:thumbup:

Next!

Number 1 is incorrect

Number 2 is incorrect

Number 3 Your close

Try again.

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 in fact 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 in fact true. only this particular statement is false.

Does that clarify things???

1) 8. There are 3 repeats in the 11 characters.
2) 1. The question asked how many remains, not how many remain. Remains are remnants. You shot one, so the remains of that one are in the tree.
3) Two possibilities, he is telling the truth or lying. If he was telling the truth, then the statement would be true that everything is a lie, including what he just said. This is a contradiction, so he can't be telling the truth. Can he by lying when he says everything is a lie, and it be logically possible? Yes, since not everything is a lie, but some things could be. So, of the two options, only the second is logically possible. Thus, he is lying.

then the second question should be worded, "how many birds' remains", not "how many birds remains"...grammatically incorrect

Point taken but it dosn't alter the nature of the question.

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. :thumbup:

JCL, again the line between truth and reality and chaos and consequences cannot be overlooked.

Yes, there are 3 repeats but the question itself was not specific enough to identify that and asked "how many letters in" not "how many duplicates of letters".

Question 2 is a conundrom in itself because the presumption is made without properly stating it that the weapon used will leave remains in the tree that dictates a certain size of branch or location on the tree where remains would be left by the type of weapon and ammunition employed. It would also vary on the size of bird and its ability to absorb and survive the impact, getting shot does not necessarily mean the bird leaves remains if it was a clean entry with no exit wound. The birds remains may even be on the ground!

Agree with your reply on 3, its fundamentals are pretty much the same as my reply.

Your first spelling of alphabet is different to your second, one too many E's!

So technically the answers I gave the first time around were interpreted by you under the paradox rules and based upon your own view of the questions were ruled to be incorrect, incorrect and close??

#3 All I can say is http://www.metacafe.com/watch/218592..._say_is_a_lie/

Good fun though and we could discuss this all day like Mickeys "Something" thread.