Philosophy – Puzzles & Contradictions
This is a collaborative post between my friend (Murray Lewis) and I (Brendan Clarke), it may be part of a series, but for now here is an article comprised of contributions by us both.
Philosophical problems are most often seen as puzzles. There will be something that we, as a race and/or as a person, do not understand and we try to solve this puzzle somehow. Somewhere in each problem, we think, there must be an ambiguity or an incorrect assumption – if we could only find it then the problem would be solved and we could rest easy.
‘Solving’ these problems, however, often raises more questions than it answers, leading to more confusion and unease. Yet, even in these situations, we strive for further clarification. A problems solution, we assume, cannot be contradictory because the universe we live in cannot be. Or can it?
Contradictions can be readily created in speech or writings. There is, for instance, nothing to prevent me from saying that ‘this post contains more than one thousand words and less than four hundred’, but it could not possibly describe how things are or ever could be.
What sense could be made of that sentence? What grasp can be made of our having free will, yet everything we do being determined by events not under our will?
A problem involves reasoning – a piece of reasoning that strikes us as excellent. We begin with beliefs, propositions or principles which are obviously true and, when we reason correctly with these truisms, our conclusions must also be true.
A paradox, however, has a conclusion that somehow we see as obviously false, unacceptable or undesirable – a conclusion that contradicts what we have already taken to be obviously true. What has gone wrong? Are there errors in the reasoning or are some of those underlying, ‘obvious’ truisms actually false?
Perhaps, even, the conclusion that we reached, despite being so obviously wrong, is the correct one? Something has to give because, although we may casually speak of the world as being contradictory, we cannot make sense of an inherently inconsistent existence.
You cannot be both reading these words and not reading these words at the same time. Perhaps you are doing something as well as reading these words, or perhaps you are doing something less than reading – skimming, but not paying attention – but you cannot be both reading and not reading at the same time.
Of course, philosophically, this is all set in stone, but in the world of science, a theory is just a theory, it will be replaced when a better one, when one comes along because some explanation is better than no explanation.
I’d like to say that through improving and evolving of ideas, the laws of physics that we have found and written to reflect and describe the world around us is a very good explanation and interpretation, one I can support more than the alternative theories (such as religious explanation). However once you leave the comfort zone of this world, laws of physics start to break apart, there are anomalies in the laws.
So what do we do? We look at them, we try to describe and create more laws to explain how our expectations could have been broken, so a theory comes along that adds to or even replaces an existing theory which better describes what we have witnessed and it will probably be a matter of refining and adding for the rest of human civilisation.
There are contradictions, problems that need resolution, in Science right now. As we speak there are a vast cauldron of problems, be it physics or anything else, that has not yet been solved, but we are striving to solve them because humans have the evolutionary advantage of knowledge and the lust for knowing and understanding, self consciousness and learning.
For example; we as humans, have determined that a temperature below absolute zero is physically (literally) impossible. What if one day it happened and not only that it happened somewhere, but it also brought about unexpected results? We’d have to rewrite that particular law in our vast system of man-made and imperfect laws.