The Paradox

Most people think paradoxes tend to be impossible occurrences. How could two futures be created from a single problematic event?
Take for example the self-detonating automaton;
At 3 pm it sends a message to itself two hours before, at 1 pm. The message tells it to self destruct at 2 pm. If it self destructs, it never sends the message back in time telling it to do so, and if it never receives the message it will survive long enough to send it.
Another example is the tachyonic anti-telephone.
Bill and Debby are in different parts of the universe. So far that light speed isn't fast enough to hold a "real time" conversation. It's a good thing they have special phones to compensate for the distance between them. The phones send messages to the past, meaning they'll receive replies before they initially send a message. This leads to a series of backwards conversations that seem to break causality. If Bill already knows what Debby is going to say in response to a question, for example, what's the purpose of asking? And if Debby never receives the question, she never answers, prompting Bill to ask.
Both possible outcomes have observers, making both real in slightly different realities. They're not parallel realities, but perpendicular, intersecting at just the right moment to break causality. That is, of course, unless there's more than one universe to hold possible outcomes. There's a myriad of simultaneously existing universes, but we can only view one at a time. That's what makes a paradox so problematic. While they can't happen in a single universe, they can easily happen over a multitude of universes, because the quantum paths are different in all possible realities. If this is true, then a paradox is simply a crux of different observable outcomes that happen at the same time, in different universes.

 

If a tree falls in the woods and nobody is around does it make a sound?

 

If some guy goes on about paradoxes without provocation, and no-one is around to care, does he make a point?

 

If I rub my dingaling while thinking of my aunt, does it make me my uncle?

 

Not unless your mother is also your sister.

 

I don't believe in multiple universes. I believe there is one reality, one chain of events, and that we call this phenomenon the universe. There is nothing else, no extra twist, nothing.

It's interesting to entertain such problems as you just demonstrated, but one would have to ask oneself if they really are anything more than games for the mind. As far as we know, you can't send messages back in time, making these problems irrelevant and invalid as a base to build theories on.

 

Funnily enough, you don't have to "believe" in it. It's (borderline) scientific fact; if you choose to be ignorant and pay no attention to what's right in front of you then so be it, but it doesnt make it not true.

 

The question at hand; Does it matter if one believes in it or not? Does't it matter if it exists or not?

 

Hey, apologies for the sarcasm, Grossenschwamm. No offense intended. Peace.

 

It will probably result in whatever thing going back in time not being able to relate information. As in, the automaton would send out the tachions, but in the past it would not be able to detect it, because doing so would collapse the probability functions. However, another detector could probably detect those tachions assuming a means of doing so was invented, without the ability to get information out of it. Meaning what you can do when you go back in time is limited, as the probabilities are limited already when you go back in time. I think this was shown by some scientist who did the calculations too - the things you can do being limited part. To be honest, I watched this in a (scientifically proper) video in Modern Physics class in high school though, so I cannot point you to any papers on the subject. You may find it fun to search around for it though.

 

That's what makes them so interesting. Personally, I find it hard to believe there's something beyond what we experience (and I also find it silly), but if we accept that there's an infinite amount of pasts and futures, then anything becomes possible. For example, an electron's job is to orbit atoms, absorb and send out photons, go forward in time, and generally have a negative charge. However, sometimes the electron will go back in time to re-absorb a photon it's just emitted. Do we see this happen? No. But due to the multitude of pasts and futures present in our universe, we know it happens. Subatomic particles tend to take the most common path, but we know all paths are possible, meaning anything, while mathematically improbable, has a possibility of happening.

And of course, we can't directly sent anything back in time. If we knew what we were doing, we'd break causality for this universe and who knows what would happen.

 

I hate paradoxes. I still have a hard time grasping whether the chicken or the egg was first. Whatever was first, how did it get there? ARGH!

 

I always considered that the egg came first. There were eggs long before there were chickens, and one day chickens began coming out of eggs. But then, in a speciation event, animals like chickens likely laid the first chicken eggs, meaning the egg came first. Another way to look at this is by examining chicken populations. There seems to be a correlation between eggs laid and chickens born, but no correlation between chickens already alive and eggs laid. Since there's no way to determine how many eggs a chicken will lay, but it is determinable how many chickens will come from an egg, the egg may have come first.

 

But where did the eggs come from? What made them, and what made the thing that made them etc. I wonder if its possible to actually blow your mind trying to comprehend it. End up brain dead.

 

Oh, like I can tell you how eggs evolved. That's a long shot I won't even take. There's a protein that determines how chicken egg shells form, called ovocleidin-17, that came both before and after the egg shell. Thing is, there were eggs before this protein even existed, making the distinction moot.
Since I can't describe it, I won't go any further. It's just too bad you've got chickens on the brain.

 

I think what Zanza's trying to say is that if we follow that train of thought, we will eventually ask who created the Universe and before we know it, we're flying into each others skyscrapers.

 

So you're saying that because people don't know which came first, conflicts will arise in those who have an idea of what came before? I agree. Though we can't blame religion for violence. Wars are caused by man, not God. Problems inevitably arise from circular reasoning.
One thing I don't understand is that if all major religions teach people to be kind to one another, why are people so willing to say one religion is wrong while another is right? This is probably a property of dualism, the metaphysical standard of the western hemisphere. Things are either good or bad. Right or wrong. Black or white.
While in the eastern hemisphere, we have the metaphysics of wholism, i.e. all things are related. You can't have good without the bad. Right and wrong are merely two ways of tackling the same problem. Without black, how would we know white?
I'd like to see a Taoist extremist.
"There is no such thing as right or wrong, good or bad. There is just the way."
On second thought, that would be boring.

 

The modern chicken is the hybrid result of a Grey Junglefowl and a Red Junglefowl. This hybrid population flourished, and was domesticated by man several thousand years ago. Pre-chicken would appear to denote hybrid junglefowl. Therefore, the egg came first.

 

Muro is the only one who seems to get it so far.