What Is Paradox? - Why Does Paradox Exist? - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSnfEZJ0SO8
Transcript: (00:04) [Music] what is paradox a few years ago i released an episode called the metaphysical implications of google's incompleteness theorem and i promised that that was part one and there's gonna be a part two well i'm long overdue on part two and this episode is in a sense part two fulfilling on that promise in this episode we're going to go deeply into the nature of paradox and how it works and why it exists this is going to be a profound explanation for the existential reasons behind paradox
(01:09) if you understand what i'm saying here you will understand why all paradox exists and why it must exist and the profound implications this has for science for epistemology for understanding what reality is and this is the kind of information that you will not hear from any scientists or materialist or academic so we're really expanding and deepening our understanding and appreciation of paradox here now i hope that like me you love paradox from a young age i've always been fascinated by paradox i didn't find it
(01:42) ugly i found it beautiful to me paradox is is one of the greatest beauties of reality to explore paradoxes and to see why they exist and why they occur and if you want a little bit more about that to get in touch with the beauty of paradox go watch my other episode called reality is a strange loop where i introduce the strange loop concept from douglas hofstadter and i illustrate it with many beautiful examples visual examples so actually funnily enough my love for paradox is ultimately what led me to the realization of absolute truth it's
(02:22) through paradox that you do this and it can do this for you too which is why this episode is not merely purely aesthetic or philosophical but actually has practical consequences because what happens is that if you are serious about pursuing and understanding paradox and you you track all paradoxes down to the very root of what sources them what you'll discover is that the source is absolute truth the thing that you've been searching for the most beautiful thing that you can discover and so paradoxes are in a sense like glitches in the
(02:54) matrix that point you towards absolute truth that's why this is practical unfortunately most minds especially scientific minds skeptical minds rational minds atheistic minds find paradox threatening there's a very good reason for why that is which we will expand upon here but before we get into all those details let's start off with the basics what is paradox the oxford dictionary has the following definition quote a paradox is a statement or proposition that despite sound reasoning from acceptable premises leads to conclusion
(03:41) that seems senseless logically unacceptable or self-contradictory end quote that is essentially what it is but we need to explore more deeply why this is the case where does paradox really come from and also we need to explore western intellectual traditions history with paradox how it struggles to deal with paradox and the fear that exists within western mainstream intellectual tradition surrounding paradox there's a deep seated fear there and one of the principles like as a rule of thumb that you should take with you
(04:26) in all of your investigations of reality is that any time there's any fear about some portion of reality whether it's a paradox of some kind or some sort of scientific truth or religious truth or any kind of thing like this uh that fear actually is your best clue that something deceptive is going on and that you should want to look deeper under that fear because that fear is hiding something from you and so sure enough western intellectual tradition has always feared paradox and it's actively swept it under the rug
(05:01) and the reason that is because paradox is very threatening for rationality for science for materialism and for the entire academic game that is being played in universities so that's an abstract explanation of what's going on but now let's get very specific about it here's the best example that i found to illustrate this point and this is an example from douglas hofstadter's other book called i am a strange loop so i'm going to read you an extensive quotation by the way this episode will
(05:35) have a lot of quotations that i'll be reading so here we go from hofstadter he's gonna explain this situation to us with one example quote
(06:10) a notion that was legitimate in set theory but that turned out to be deeply self-contradictory when set theory turned out to allow self-contradictory entities like this russell's dream of solidly grounding mathematics came crashing down on him this trauma instilled in him a terror of theories that permitted loops of self-reference since he attributed the intellectual devastation he had experienced to loopiness and to loopiness alone in trying to recover then russell working with his old mentor and new colleague whitehead invented a novel (06:43) kind of set theory in which a definition of a set could never invoke that set and moreover in which a strict linguistic hierarchy was set up rigidly preventing any sentence from referring to itself when i read about this theory of types it struck me as a pathological retreat from common sense as well as from the fascination of loops categorically banishing all loops of reference struck me as such a paranoid maneuver that i was disappointed for a lifetime with the one spit and twice shy mind of bertrand russell what remained (07:17) with me however was the realization that some highly educated and otherwise sensible people are irrationally allergic to the idea of self-reference or of the structures or systems that fall back upon themselves i suspect that such people's allergy stems in the final analysis from a deep-seated fear of paradox or of the universe exploding metaphorically end quote this beautiful passage by hofstadter just perfectly encapsulates the point that i'm trying to make and many rationally minded people still don't fathom the significance (07:59) of what is explained in this passage there is sort of just the simple literal definition or the literal example here the literal lesson of this example which is some nerdy aspect of set theory and mathematics and logic which to most people you might be wondering like leo what does this matter how does this apply to my life it doesn't matter at all yes that's a very nerdy application of this issue but what i want you to see is that we need to expand and learn a broader deeper more universal lesson here from
(08:33) this one specific instance with the failure of set theory and and this is a lesson that has still not been learned by most scientists by rationalists academics and materialists because they're still playing this game of believing that they can ground reality into some sort of formal logical symbolic system this is impossible to do and if you want more about the problems with that go watch part one of the series which is the metaphysical implications of girdles and completeness theorem i won't rehash all that here
(09:13) but suffice it to say basically in a nutshell what happened was that historically is that a
(09:56) and learning the lesson of like aha our whole scheme here of trying to formalize and rationalize reality is impossible and that we've been fools for trying to do so rather than learning that lesson instead what most scientists and academics did is they said ah well that just means