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.

What did you expect? It was 1:00am. Now the spelling has been corrected.

Actually i don't make the rules regarding this paradox. So i'm not claiming to be right but indeed passing on information which has been established long before both you and i. Will add the links later gotta go.

No probs here, I thought this was a friendly discussion.

Are you reading Sartre too? the whole "picturing yourself on a bus, looking out the window watching yourself running for the bus" thing fascinated me back in Philosophy 101 in college. still can't do it ;)

Which one?

The Transcendence of the Ego was my favorite written after his military service. Mind blowing.

Being and Nothingness.

http://www.amazon.com/Being-Nothingn.../dp/0671867806

Heres one for you guys!!!

Your in a solid concret square room 4ft thick every direction (up down left right) there is three items in the room with you.. its a Chain Saw, Table, and a Fork..... how do you get out???? and u cant dig out or use the chain saw to get out either its too thick..

Heres another one

Whats yellow and looks like a bucket??

hehe tell u the answer tommorow or later!!!

Sure it is.

Sorry if i gave the wrong impression but friendly sarcastic i am sometime. :rofl:

There was a man one night. He started to run straight forward. Then he turned left. Soon after, he turned left again. Then he started running toward home. When he got home there were 2
masked men waiting for him. Who were they?

If your asking me then the answer is no. This all started because i started to pickup reading where i left off in a book that's a difficult read regarding "Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem". It was a preface to arguments regarding artificial intelligence. But heres part of what it covers.

In 1931, the Czech-born mathematician Kurt Gödel demonstrated that within any given branch of mathematics, there would always be some propositions that couldn't be proven either true or false using the rules and axioms ... of that mathematical branch itself. You might be able to prove every conceivable statement about numbers within a system by going outside the system in order to come up with new rules an axioms, but by doing so you'll only create a larger system with its own unprovable statements. The implication is that all logical system of any complexity are, by definition, incomplete; each of them contains, at any given time, more true statements than it can possibly prove according to its own defining set of rules.

Gödel's Theorem has been used to argue that a computer can never be as smart as a human being because the extent of its knowledge is limited by a fixed set of axioms, whereas people can discover unexpected truths ... It plays a part in modern linguistic theories, which emphasize the power of language to come up with new ways to express ideas. And it has been taken to imply that you'll never entirely understand yourself, since your mind, like any other closed system, can only be sure of what it knows about itself by relying on what it knows about itself.

And here's the part you referenced,

The other metaphorical analogue to Gödel's Theorem which I find provocative suggests that ultimately, we cannot understand our own mind/brains ... Just as we cannot see our faces with our own eyes, is it not inconceivable to expect that we cannot mirror our complete mental structures in the symbols which carry them out? All the limitative theorems of mathematics and the theory of computation suggest that once the ability to represent your own structure has reached a certain critical point, that is the kiss of death: it guarantees that you can never represent yourself totally. http://web.archive.org/web/200308061...org/godel.html

Quick,

if you are looking at AI theorem and the ability to understand the mechanics of creating a computer that mirrors the mental mechanics of a human being you're on the right track. Did a lot of this metaphysical stuff years ago and boy it has not changed that much because the basis for most of it is still in the writings of a few scholars whose theories have so far proven correct or the technology is still at a state where they may be proven wrong.

I used to work in Defense Avionics and our task was to work out how to defeat the enemies latest technologies we used some of the teachings that you are probably reading to introduce models around possible areas to defeat the tech. its amazing what a bit of Math and positive out of the box thinking can achieve.

Actually I started with this man many years ago. http://www.asimovonline.com/

Man takes chain saw, cuts table in half. He then joins the two parts of the table to make a "hole" (as in whole) and climbs out.

A yellow bucket.

Tomorrow is now today. Where are the answers?

Have been an avid reader of Isaac's for years. He was so prolific and so detailed in his writings I was so amazed I have read some of his books three or four times. Philip K. Dick is another one.

why couldn't # 2 also be 10? just because u shot the bird
doesn't mean u killed him/her, nor does it mean he/she isn't
still in the tree.:nanana:

the umpire and catcher.:nanana:

It is assumed for the sake of it being a math problem that one bird is gone
dead or not

Hey asawadude you got it right hehe!!!