08 April, 2013

On the Liar Paradox

The problem with Truth is that Truth is a convention, a tag, a label, it has no real meaning it's just a state, and as we all know nothing stays the same for a long time, so should the Truth?
Another problem with truth is not only that we argue about what is true but also about what true is. I believe the quarrel started out between Plato and The Stoics.
The First considered Truth as a Static Being that exists and we only glimpse parts of it, effectively defining Truth as the Total Information in the universe, problem is that most of this information is hidden anyway and we know now that gets into hiding as the universe evolves aka entropy, so what Plato tell us is that we just can't hold the whole Truth, but it is there to go get some and discover some more, mine entropy. Ideal?
The Second considered Truth only on the observable part of the universe, the truth that could be touched, and that Truth is supported by evidence. Essentially demanding Statements to provide long causality/validation chains before accepted as Truth. Practical?
So what about "This statement is False", and even more troubling what about "This statement is True"?
-Interlude
Two men are standing on two daises the first is preaching "All men are Liars" and the Other says "All men are True", The question is who tells the Truth and who will you believe? Isn't Truth and Faith the same? or not?
Back to the question now,
One like  Plato would attack the paradoxial first by saying that both statements are self-referring and thus they are uninformative, they carry no information therefore cannot be valued, maybe even detached from the Universal Truth? or at least forever in the realm of entropy. But would be particularly happy with the second statement perhaps even placing it as the First truth.
A stoic on the other hand would  mistrust both statements likewise for lack of evidence and say something like "insufficient data" or "cannot compute"
Both would agree however that those statements are useless and add nothing to the understanding of truth other that some weird situations can arise.
But let us make something out of nothing. What if we follow the stoic view and add a dimension of time so that our logic variables can evolve. Let us have time be discreet and set up a tick for every computation event. A computation event occurs every time a variable is referenced. Now the paradox no longer arises as the statement now spins from true to false as it evolves in time, while the second although has a steady value still evolves.
If we stop and evaluate the statement at different times we may get an inconsistency but at least the statement will evaluate. If we don't then we will never evaluate it but avoid the inconsistency. Is this Godel's theorem? or is it Heisenberg's Principle? Is the statement actually in superposition?

Hail Eris All Hail Uncertainty