Paradoxes, from Your Coffee to Calculus
wsj.com
wsj.com
The central premise is that paradoxes allow us to change our way of thinking.
Some examples: can't find your glasses because you can't see without them; can't make coffee because you need coffee to wake up in order to make it; how can you be intolerant of intolerance etc.
They then describe the barber paradox and some of Zeno's paradoxes. How the barber paradox informs us how important it is for us to define things and set limits. And how Zeno's paradoxes led us to calculus.
They then say that they resolve their paradoxes by having a place they put their glasses, setting up the coffee machine the night before, and hating the sin, not the sinner.
And that's pretty much it. Over a thousand words to say that she's a tolerant person who hates intolerance.
Paradoxes can change how we reason. Being able to think about them allows oneself to refine an understanding to a static context of parts. Once that is complete, a paradox can be resolved by defining a logic of which no paradox arises, and testing it to ensure that, which is still NP hard to prove but, for real life, some people just like to make points and feel smart and talk about things they maybe never got to talk about before.
I wasn't really disagreeing with anything, I was breaking down the article for people who don't have a WSJ subscription, don't want one, and don't want to bother with the archive link.
I feel the article is mostly pedantic fluff, reiterating a concept that most people are already familiar with in order to just say what she says in the final paragraph: That she can be a tolerant person, tolerate people, while still disagreeing with their viewpoint. Basically responding to the whole "you can't be tolerant and hate intolerance" canard.
My issue isn't with her stance on paradoxes, it's with the fact that she doesn't say anything.
You can call it pedantic fluff, I call it a coupled fear of having one's own mind appear hypermasculinized while maintaining sensitivity to multiple perspectives of listening to many individuals without being listened to directly.
Big picture. The devil is in the details.
Edit: maybe wait a few hours before downvoting next time? at least give me the opportunity to not see it as being likely to be you
A user cannot downvote a reply to their own comment. (And complaining about downvoting is never productive.)
Huzzah!
Keep insulting -> make my perspective stronger.
in original comment you were claming that “she wants to think logically” as if women don’t do that, and that statement sounds insulting to women... so...
If you don't want to understand my perspective, you don't want to.
The other issue is the theory-laden ness of observations. Every observation is theory laden. Most of the time we don’t even perceive this theory-ladenness because we see them as some atomic facts.
The trick here is to describe the phenomenon at a lower level when paradoxes arise at higher level.
Adequate language or computer code makes them go away. You are not blind without glasses - you can distinguish shapes and remember the shape of the room and where you may have left glasses and probe with your hand to find them.
You are not comatose without coffee - you are conscious, and take coffee just to feel more alert.
And so on, that with the right language (but it is easier to do that with mathematics or code) the paradox goes away. Like the Zeno paradox with calculus.
Study zen buddhism, if you want evidence.
Care to give me some examples?
The answer is unthinking- as in meditation, clear thoughts from the mind. It is designed to show how the right answer is no answer, in both senses!
With the proper understanding, there is no paradox. I agree with you that noticing a potential paradox is sometimes a souce of inspiration to learn, mostly when you can not show the way and when it must come by self discovery.
I do not know how familiar you are with Buddhism. If you want to keep learning, ask yourself: if Kyogen was asked 3 times, would he change his "answer" ?
> If Kyogen was asked 3 times, would he change his answer?
Probably depends on some stuff I don't have the awareness yet for.
Good luck with your study of buddhism!
Knowing the difference is sometimes not knowing.
(1) Operating a machine implies having been drinking coffee.
(2) Drinking coffee implies having operated the coffee making machine.