Paradoxes and us

                                 

Humans don’t like paradoxes .They make us uncomfortable and doubt about the knowledge we create , but paradoxes have been among us since people began to think about and make theories about our nature and universe. Some scientist like Albert Einstein believed that it’s a misunderstanding of nature but in the other hand his colleagues like Neil Bhor believed it’s a part of the nature. I think there is no single field that doesn’t have paradoxes in its domain and actually sometimes these mysterious entities help us to think more deeply and outside of the box and discover more fascinating and useful knowledge.

I found this very interesting video on YouTube and it tells us about some of the famous paradoxes in physics, maths and computer science in very interesting manner. (I couldn’t stop laughing when I watch this video because of the way the speaker presents these ideas.)so please have a look at the following video before continuing .(I guarantee you will enjoy this very much.)

1.Zeno’s paradox

Zeno’s paradox could be one of the oldest among its kind, yet it’s still very fascinating to think about the distance problem like Zeno. I always get amazed when I realized that there are infinitely many natural numbers between just 0 and 1.although we can clearly see definite length yet that space can be divided into infinitely many constituents. It’s very hard to grasp but it is what it is!!!.there are quite number of instances that we can see where one of the property of an object becomes infinite while other one remains finite.(I know only  few  which I came across in maths and physics.)

·         In Gabriel’s horn the volume of the horn reaches to a limit  while it’s surface area became a infinite value .(if u solve the integrations below you will be able see this to your self.)

( Image retrieved from http://www.rhurrell.com/gabriel.html )

·         In mathematics there is a fractal called “Koch Snowflake” which first discovered by Helge Von Koch .The speciality of this fractal is that it has an infinite length but a finite surface area.

These are some of my favourite things in this subject and I think these concepts challenge our common sense every time we stare at them.These things make us very uncomfortable about thinking them.How can be a volume of an object is finite while it's surface area is not.The easiest answer to this would be simply they are purely mathematical objects but even still it's very hard for us to believe it.

2.The grandfather paradox

                Every time i hear this story the first thing that comes to my mind is what happens if the time traveller goes back in time and killed the very first human beings on earth.if the grandfather paradox is true, then all the human race should wipe out from earth but there is another possibility that it might be a beginning of a new history,an alternative one. still no one has no idea what might true but I would like to go with the second possibility more than 1^st one. I’m a believer in the parallel universe or rather alternative realities idea (this is my personal opinion only) and in this paradoxes are  not  mind boggling ideas but a normal phenomena. In brief, parallel universe idea says that every time we make a choice a new reality will occur that slightly different from our one.So there is no effect  from what we change in our current timeline. So no matter how much time you travel back in time and kill your ancestors, you will exist and some other reality you will not. As well as this We all have instances  in our lives that we want to change but don’t worry somewhere in this space-time some other form of yourself is going to make that choice live with that. So be happy at least someone like you had made that decision that you couldn’t .I’ll talk more about this in the last section.  

3.The Chinese room

Well this is the first instance I’ve heard of this paradox and it seems it’s rather unfair to think that machines can’t be intelligence just because they can’t speak a language besides I don’t see any reason to categorize this idea as a paradox. It’s just an opinion of some person.

Personally I believe that artificial intelligence isn’t a science fiction. even today some machines (or softwares )are able to behave like human beings ,that are similar to thinking or rather logical reasoning. But the intelligence we expecting from AI machines are much much complex and diverse than just logical reasoning. As humans we use both logical reasoning and just our instinct for our survival  and it’s obvious that logical reasoning is very helpful when the number of unknowns(or variables)are few and clearly visible but most of the time it’s our natural instinct or rather illogical approach to a problem helps us to solve our problems where the number of unknowns are very large or hidden from us.   It’s something that even humans don’t fully understand the mechanism behind it. So how can we give this gift to robots ?When we think about the intelligence  the next most important thing is conciseness that humans have about themselves as well as the world around them. I think this is the hardest part of AI engineering as we have very little knowledge it’s nature and the difficulty to model these using the knowledge we have. So even if we are long way from creating the next intelligent being on earth I hope there will be an end to this road. I have to say this topic is very interesting one and sometimes it seems more philosophical than scientific.  

I'll tell more about the other 3 paradoxes in my next post.Please feel free to let me know your ideas by comments.