Wednesday 5 November 2008

Perhaps the Final Paradox Piece

As said at some point in the earlier posts, the mental urge towards the existence of the paradox or/and the worldview arising from belief in its existence amount to gnosticism, reality divided against itself, and as Borges says, false, though the very word 'false' should have told Borges all he needed to know about the falseness of this vision. Ultimately a schizophrenic universe. But as shown all the given paradoxes are not paradoxes at all, but are either illogical at source or seen as paradoxes as a result of false views of the reality mirrored by the logic of a mental set-piece.
The paradox is itself, obviously enough, an exercise in language, and here the senselessness of the very concept of the paradox becomes clear. The entire basis of the correct use of language is its meaningfulness, and as a reasoning tool all language properly used must be meaningful. The paradox seeks to meaningfully use language to create a meaningless result. This is self-evidently impossible, and makes as much sense as to imagine one can get a wrong answer within mathematics. And if you do apparently get a wrong answer, then that's the problem. You've gone wrong.

And knowing there must simply be an error, the given paradoxes were shown to be childishly easy to unravel. The error people make is to leap aboard what is imagined to be the ensuing logical train, rather than looking closely at the alleged paradox precisely as an existential language construct. If an example of the simply meaningless construct, there is no way out of the resulting train of logic. Being meaningless it contains no meaning, and one is lost within the enclosed loop of the labyrinth.
The most elegant 'paradox' I've come across and the most subtle to unravel is below, and its elegance of construct and deconstruction lies in its being so purely a matter of language.

A famous idea or paradox is that God could not conceive of something of which he could not do. God of course being used here in the sense of an all-powerful entity, and so since he could not do the above, then he cannot be all-powerful.
I have no idea to what extent this notion has been examined and what excursions of reason it has involved, but a possibly unexamined view is that the thought is being looked at from the wrong linguistic angle. The usual emphasis being that God could not conceive of something of which he could not do.
However, the same sentence can be looked at from a slightly different perspective offering a radically different significance.
God could not conceive of something of which he would not be capable, and he achieves this by not conceiving of it. Thus an all-powerful entity's absolute mastery is maintained.


Again, the error we make is to rush to examine the logic, while it is in the linguistic structure where the truth lies.
Though come to think of it, this will probably not be the last paradox post, since as reason, or what is imagined to be reason, is usually set in motion in the service of already imagined and desired 'truths,' then why this gnostic divided worldview occurs in the first place should be looked at.

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