List of paradoxes This is a list of paradoxes, grouped thematically. The grouping is approximate, as paradoxes may fit into more than one category. Because of varying definitions of the term paradox, some of the following are not considered to be paradoxes by everyone. This list collects only scenarios that have been called a paradox by at least one source and have their own article. Although considered paradoxes, some of these are based on fallacious reasoning, or incomplete/faulty analysis. Logic[edit] Self-reference[edit] These paradoxes have in common a contradiction arising from self-reference. Barber paradox: A barber (who is a man) shaves all and only those men who do not shave themselves. Vagueness[edit] Ship of Theseus (a.k.a. Mathematics[edit] Statistics[edit] Probability[edit] Infinity and infinitesimals[edit] Geometry and topology[edit] The Banach–Tarski paradox: A ball can be decomposed and reassembled into two balls the same size as the original.
More Than 1 Billion People Are Hungry in the World For many in the West, poverty is almost synonymous with hunger. Indeed, the announcement by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in 2009 that more than 1 billion people are suffering from hunger grabbed headlines in a way that any number of World Bank estimates of how many poor people live on less than a dollar a day never did. But is it really true? Are there really more than a billion people going to bed hungry each night? Our research on this question has taken us to rural villages and teeming urban slums around the world, collecting data and speaking with poor people about what they eat and what else they buy, from Morocco to Kenya, Indonesia to India. But unfortunately, this is not always the world as the experts view it. Jeffrey Sachs, an advisor to the United Nations and director of Columbia University's Earth Institute, is one such expert. But then there are others, equally vocal, who believe that all of Sachs's answers are wrong. What is going on? Why?
Consciousness Search tips There are three kinds of search you can perform: All fields This mode searches for entries containing all the entered words in their title, author, date, comment field, or in any of many other fields showing on OPC pages. Surname This mode searches for entries containing the text string you entered in their author field. Advanced This mode differs from the all fields mode in two respects. Note that short and / or common words are ignored by the search engine. The Social Psychological Narrative—or—What Is Social Psychology, Anyway? There has been a question lurking in the back of my mind for all those years, which is how can we take this basic knowledge and use it to solve problems of today? I grew up in the turbulent 1960s, in an era where it seemed like the whole world was changing, and that we could have a hand in changing it. Part of my reason for studying psychology in the first place was because I felt that this was something that could help solve social problems. In graduate school and beyond I fell in love with basic research, which is still my first love. It is thrilling to investigate basic questions of self-knowledge and consciousness and unconsciousness. But those other, more applied questions have continued to rattle around and recently come to the fore, the more I realized how much social psychology has to offer. One of the basic assumptions of the field is that it's not the objective environment that influences people, but their constructs of the world. There are lots of other examples.
Animal Thought By Temple Grandin, Ph.D. Department of Animal Science Colorado State University Western Horseman, Nov. 1997, pp.140-145 (Updated January 2015) Temple Grandin is an assistant professor of animal science at Colorado State University. As a person with autism, it is easy for me to understand how animals think because my thinking processes are like an animal's. I have no language-based thoughts at all. Most people use a combination of both verbal and visual skills. A radio station person I talked to once said that she had no pictures at all in her mind. Associative Thinking A horse trainer once said to me, "Animals don't think, they just make associations." Animals also tend to make place-specific associations. Years ago a scientist named N. Fear Is the Main Emotion Fear is the main emotion in autism and it is also the main emotion in prey animals such as horses and cattle. Both animals and people with autism are also fearful of high-pitched noises. Fear-based behaviors are complex. References
How consciousness works – Michael Graziano Scientific talks can get a little dry, so I try to mix it up. I take out my giant hairy orangutan puppet, do some ventriloquism and quickly become entangled in an argument. I’ll be explaining my theory about how the brain — a biological machine — generates consciousness. Kevin, the orangutan, starts heckling me. ‘Yeah, well, I don’t have a brain. But I’m still conscious. Kevin is the perfect introduction. Many thinkers have approached consciousness from a first-person vantage point, the kind of philosophical perspective according to which other people’s minds seem essentially unknowable. Lately, the problem of consciousness has begun to catch on in neuroscience. I believe that the easy and the hard problems have gotten switched around. In a period of rapid evolutionary expansion called the Cambrian Explosion, animal nervous systems acquired the ability to boost the most urgent incoming signals. Attention requires control. I call this the ‘attention schema theory’. And then what?
The Relativity of Wrong by Isaac Asimov I received a letter from a reader the other day. It was handwritten in crabbed penmanship so that it was very difficult to read. In the first sentence, he told me he was majoring in English Literature, but felt he needed to teach me science. It seemed that in one of my innumerable essays, here and elsewhere, I had expressed a certain gladness at living in a century in which we finally got the basis of the Universe straight. I didn't go into detail in the matter, but what I meant was that we now know the basic rules governing the Universe, together with the gravitational interrelationships of its gross components, as shown in the theory of relativity worked out between 1905 and 1916. These are all twentieth-century discoveries, you see. The young specialist in English Lit, having quoted me, went on to lecture me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the Universe at last, and in every century they were proven to be wrong. "Wrong!"
Evangelists of Democracy LIKE THE human-rights movement, democracy promotion is a radical project of social and political transformation whose adherents will not or cannot acknowledge either the ideological or the revolutionary character of their enterprise. In this, democracy promotion should be understood as a subset of contemporary liberalism—the only major modern ideology that denies it is an ideology at all. More precisely, it is the end state of human political organization after all the other ideologies have withered away, the future’s moral default position. There is irony in this proud assertion of openness to new ideas and dismissal of “closed,” undemocratic societies on the grounds that they, as Soros once complained, “claim to be in possession of the ultimate truth.” What is it about democracy promotion that drives otherwise hardheaded people to such extremes?
Allegory of the Cave Plato realizes that the general run of humankind can think, and speak, etc., without (so far as they acknowledge) any awareness of his realm of Forms. The allegory of the cave is supposed to explain this. In the allegory, Plato likens people untutored in the Theory of Forms to prisoners chained in a cave, unable to turn their heads. All they can see is the wall of the cave. Behind them burns a fire. From Great Dialogues of Plato (Warmington and Rouse, eds.) Here are some students’ illustrations of Plato’s Cave Go back to lecture on the Phaedo Go back to lecture on the “One Over Many” Argument Go to next lecture on Criticism of Forms Need a quick review of the Theory of Forms? Return to the PHIL 320 Home Page Copyright © 2006, S.
What the science of human nature can teach us After the boom and bust, the mania and the meltdown, the Composure Class rose once again. Its members didn’t make their money through hedge-fund wizardry or by some big financial score. Theirs was a statelier ascent. They got good grades in school, established solid social connections, joined fine companies, medical practices, and law firms. Wealth settled down upon them gradually, like a gentle snow. You can see a paragon of the Composure Class having an al-fresco lunch at some bistro in Aspen or Jackson Hole. A few times a year, members of this class head to a mountain resort, carrying only a Council on Foreign Relations tote bag (when you have your own plane, you don’t need luggage that actually closes). Occasionally, you meet a young, rising member of this class at the gelato store, as he hovers indecisively over the cloudberry and ginger-pomegranate selections, and you notice that his superhuman equilibrium is marred by an anxiety. Help comes from the strangest places. Ms.