Time & Eternity

What are we really dealing with now? In the words of RDN @rdnxyz, it is not a technological problem, a cultural problem, a mental problem, an economic problem, or a political problem. “We are in the midst of a Religious conflict.” I agree, except that I would call it “Spiritual conflict” rather than “Religious conflict”. Everything is ultimately spiritual. The visible (physical) is temporal, but the invisible (spiritual) is eternal (2 Corinthians 4:18). Man is… Read More »The battle on earth

I tried to watch the TV series The Three-Body. The 30-episode series is based on the now-famous novel The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin. I couldn’t last more than an hour and had to skim to the end quickly. I generally have a soft spot for sci-fi and can often passively receive low-quality junk for quite a while before my brain can come up with a firm “stop” signal. But this is worse than junk. … Read More »“The Three-Body Problem” and Scidolatry

The barber paradox If the barber shaves everyone who does not shave himself, who shaves the barber? The question is the so-called Barber paradox. It is paradoxical because it always leads to a self-contradictory answer. The barber paradox may strike as a trivial witty remark to many, but it is related to something far more serious. It is an example of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, which says that formal logic (arithmetically expressible logic) cannot be both… Read More »Man and machine, intuitive logic and arithmetic logic

The barber paradox: If the barber shaves everyone who does not shave himself, who shaves the barber? The barber paradox may strike as a trivial witty remark to many, but it is related to something far more serious. It is an example of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, which says that formal logic (arithmetically expressible logic) cannot be both self-consistent and self-provable. In other words, the consistency of formal logic cannot be proved in the formal logic… Read More »Barber paradox and existence of truth

Complexity as a phenomenon is real. The problem is that Complexity Theory (and its theorists) tend to have an ideological bend toward positivism, relativism, and existentialism and presume that the universe or its subsystems (including life and human organizations) do not have a moral purpose. Some do acknowledge that there must be some built-in hidden purposeful order that drives the complexity, but overall, they find satisfaction in the idea that the self-organizing order can emerge… Read More »Complexity and purpose

The sleeping beauty paradox is a problem that has puzzled mathematicians and many other scholars for decades. Here is a description of the problem: Participants volunteer to undergo the following experiment and are told all of the following details: On Sunday she will be put to sleep. Depending on a coin toss (see below) during the experiment, she will be either awakened, interviewed just once, or after the first interview put back to sleep with… Read More »The sleeping beauty paradox is a fallacy