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Posted by: Tupolev
Posted by: Dustin 6047
Should I explain?
But beware, paradoxes don't end and I don't want to spend the rest of life or matter of fact, eternity writing on this thread.[/quote]
Okay. Here we go.
So imagine the beginning of the Universe or the big bang atleast since we don't know what happened before that; approximately 14 billion years ago. There was all the matter and energy stored in one single grain of dust (size is a fat guess). Then, of course, it goes 'ablooooom' and all of it is released in every direction for an eternity (maybe - maybe not an eternity). Okay lets jump forward to the time of the Forerunners. What they can do is plot out all and every single atom and energy joule to predict where it will go. And so they can predict the energy and transfors in another beings brain or whatever that individual has to figure out what those transfors will make that individual do.
Now how that turns into a paradox...
Well, the AI that does all these calculations will also have to predict its own thoughts for it to be accurate. This isn't possible since consiousness always changes on what you experience. If you see all the data come in you may think something of that which would ruin everything, in fact there's no way stopping you from thinking of it. The only thing that could do that would have to be a non-concious machine, but for a machine to have all the energy and matter predicted and plotted out to somehow convert that information to something you and me would understand would also be impossible.
But maybe not and maybe this isn't a paradox now that I'm laying this all out.
You decide.
Maybe I'll try and restate this in a different way which, while not quite as rigid as it could be, hopefully gets the point across intuitively.
-Assume that a person is in possession of a button and perfect prediction machine which is never wrong. The person is able to push the button up to one time per day.
-One day, the person decides that they will ask this perfect prediction machine whether or not they will push the button the next day, and decides that they will do the opposite of what the machine says.
-Note that, now, anything the machine says will be wrong. However, we said in our assumptions that the machine is never wrong. So, we have a contradiction.
It, at least intuitively, seems that the only way that the truth machine could possibly be assured to be correct is if the person reading the truth machine never used the information to have any sort in causal interference that could possibly counteract that which was predicted. In other words, if the universe is deterministic, then a truth machine could work fine as long as nothing whatsoever read off of it.
Feels strongly related to Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, too. Hmm.
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Of course, I might be totally missing something. It would be interesting to learn where people have looked deeper into this stuff.
You are totally right. As perfect prediction is technically time travelling it would always cause a paradox. You can't change the future or past.