John Baez:What would you do if someone played an elaborate and disturbing prank like this on you? What should you do? If the laws of physics seem to break down, and unpleasant magic seems to invade the universe… what’s your best strategy?I think the best thing is to run away, fast. After all, even if it’s a trick, there’s no way to know where it will stop! And there’s not much benefit in staying around to find out. If other people survive, they’ll be glad to tell you.In practice, most people seem to freeze and watch in horror… backing away just slightly… not enough to do much good.In classical logic, an inconsistency implies anything, so if you ever discover 2+2=5, all bets are off: it follows, for example, that you can fly! In more flexible paraconsistent logic, a single contradiction doesn’t bring down the whole system. But it’s always hard to decide what to do when a seemingly impossible thing happens – or even something highly improbable. Usually it’s a ‚trick‘ of some sort. But a very elaborate trick means that someone has done a lot of work to make strange things happen… so it’s hard to predict what they’ll do next.
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John Baez:What would you do if someone played an elaborate and disturbing prank like this on you? What should you do? If the laws of physics seem to break down, and unpleasant magic seems to invade the universe… what’s your best strategy?I think the best thing is to run away, fast. After all, even if it’s a trick, there’s no way to know where it will stop! And there’s not much benefit in staying around to find out. If other people survive, they’ll be glad to tell you.In practice, most people seem to freeze and watch in horror… backing away just slightly… not enough to do much good.In classical logic, an inconsistency implies anything, so if you ever discover 2+2=5, all bets are off: it follows, for example, that you can fly! In more flexible paraconsistent logic, a single contradiction doesn’t bring down the whole system. But it’s always hard to decide what to do when a seemingly impossible thing happens – or even something highly improbable. Usually it’s a ‚trick‘ of some sort. But a very elaborate trick means that someone has done a lot of work to make strange things happen… so it’s hard to predict what they’ll do next.
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