This article is a lie!

Yes you heard it right, this article is a lie but before I get into the title let's talk about something else! 

I'm sure everyone reading this blog has seen the sand dunes by now. But wait, what exactly is a "heap of sand"?

Assume this sand heap contains 1,000,000 grains of sand. Let's take out just one grain of sand. Is it still a heap? Yes? So, how about I pull out another? What about another?

If you still say yes, we must conclude that even after I take out 999,998 grains of sand, it is still a heap of sand.

Let's try something different. Let's do it backward, beginning with one grain of sand. We progress from one to ten, then to ten thousand. When does it return to being a sand dune?

We label so many things, mostly for "naming purposes". However, in theory, things can become perplexing.

Just like time travel, which is perplexing and can have disastrous consequences. Consider yourself the last living grandson of Adolf Hitler. You grew up reading about your grandfather's terrible actions and realising that this is not what you want your family to be known for. As a result, you spend your entire life attempting to solve the problem of time. Until now, the time has only moved forward but you finally achieve your life's goal after years of hard work. You've created a fully operational time machine. You travel back to 1930. So you track down and assassinate your grandfather.

Congratulations, you've become a murderer... However, you have also saved the lives of tens of millions of other people. But now that your grandfather is no longer alive, neither does one of your parents and thus neither do you. So, if you don't exist, who murdered your grandfather?

This is referred to as the Grandfather Paradox. At first glance, it appears absurd, but upon closer inspection, it becomes logical. Does the timeline you're in split into two, or have you altered history forever? Or it's not history anymore, is it? You're only affecting your new present. 

Paradoxes are all around us, and you'd be surprised how prevalent they are in our daily lives.

The Symphony of the Seas is the world's most expensive as well as a luxurious cruise ship, costing nearly 1.5 billion dollars to build. The ship has 22 restaurants, 24 pools, an ice skating rink, and even a full-size basketball court. For that price, the ship should be unique, a one-of-a-kind vessel. After three years at sea, it's safe to say that this ship is still original. However, as we all know, things wear out, break, and eventually need to be replaced. So, say the Symphony of the Seas renovates its ice rink in ten years. The ship's restaurants are all renovated 20 years later. The ship's steel is then replaced with new steel after 50 years. Can we still call the ship original at that point?

Is the Symphony of the Seas still in operation? What if all of the old ship parts were used to build an entirely new ship? Which of these two ships would you call the original Symphony of the Seas? Which one had all of its parts replaced? Or the one made from all of the replaced parts?

What distinguishes something as unique?

It's not just about the Symphony of the Seas, but we can all relate to it if we look closely! We human beings are similar to that ship. If you compare a picture of yourself as a baby to what you look like now, you will notice a significant difference. In fact, in just a couple of years, you get a completely new body with newly formed cells! 

So, are you unique? You might say, "Oh, it's your thoughts and actions that make you unique," but when you were a kid, most of us believed that babies came from the store or that if you swallow watermelon seeds, an entire watermelon tree will grow inside you, and unless you still believe those things now, your thoughts and convictions have changed, so what exactly makes you unique? What makes you, well, you?

It's not that easy. When it comes to being unique, have you ever heard of the term anti-Stratfordian? No, neither do I. These are people who do not believe Williams Shakespeare wrote the works that have been attributed to him. It may appear to be a silly hoax, but well-known personalities like Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Sigmund Freud, and even Prince Phillip all believe in it. They argue that Shakespeare lacked the necessary education and travel experience to write the works that he did. But, if not Williams Shakespeare, who wrote the books?

Here steps in the famous bootstrap paradox! 

It's the year 2209, and a young boy named William, who is obsessed with Shakespeare's works, discovers a time machine. So, unlike any normal person, he entered the machine and set the time to 1610, the height of Shakespeare's popularity.

Upon his arrival, he went in search of the famous playwright, who was working in London at the time. The boy asked around, but no one knew where the great Shakespeare could be found. In fact, they had never heard of the company before. The boy was befuddled and devastated, and he had no idea what was going on. But then he remembered that he always has a copy of Romeo and Juliet with him. So, in honor of his idol, he brought out this book, rewrote it, and published it under the name William Shakespeare.

But, if William Shakespeare did not exist in the first place, who wrote Romeo and Juliet, which he brought with him? The Bootstrap Paradox states that an object or piece of information sent back in time becomes trapped in an infinite cause-effect loop. It has no starting point. In our scenario, the boy has become trapped in a "causal loop." In the future, as a young boy in 2209, he will come across the Romeo and Juliet book again, and the same sequence of events will occur again, and again, and again, forever. This begs the question, "How do we know we're not just reliving what happened?" How do we know we're not trapped in a causal loop every time we wake up? Because let's face it, if we were, we'd never know.

We can remember the past but not the future, so we'll never know if something that's about to happen has already happened. But Deja Vu gets us pretty close. Deja Vu, which literally means "already seen," is the sensation that you have previously experienced the current situation. 

But what if Deja Vu is more than a feeling? What if we're truly reliving the present event over and over, and we can only remember parts of it because our brains aren't strong enough to retain all of the information in the loop? Our observation skills deteriorate as we get older. Our brains believe we already know how the world works, so we conclude things that we can never be certain are true. How do you know the light in the fridge is turned off if you've never seen it? Is there a sound made when a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it?

You can make educated guesses, but you can never be certain. This paradox is known as "Schrödinger's Cat," and the original phrase was much grimmer.

Simply put, a cat is placed in a box with a poisonous gas and a radioactive atom that has a 50% chance of decaying within the next hour. If the atom completely decays, it releases the gas, which kills the cat. However, because radioactive decay is completely random, no one knows when it will occur. What is the cat's condition before Schrödinger opens the box? Is it alive or dead? Schrodinger is essentially saying that until the box is opened, the cat must be considered both alive and dead. It exists in a hazy reality. The cat, according to Schrödinger, fits into a single reality.

Who knows, perhaps the alternate possibility occurs in a parallel universe. Neither outcome is certain until the box is opened. Okay, we went dark for a second there, and as the saying goes, there is a rainbow after every storm, but is there? The rainbow only exists when we look at it; when we take our gaze away from it, the rainbow vanishes. This is not a paradox; it is simply entertaining to consider.

Rainbows are optical illusions created by raindrops, the Sun, and the angle at which we view everything. This is why, no matter how fast or far you move, the rainbow will always be the same distance away from you. While scientists explain the existence of a rainbow in this way, religious people attribute it to the work of a deity, or God.

However, whether you believe in God or not, this causes me to question things.

It reminds me of the Omnipotence Paradox.

Can an omnipotent being (someone who can do absolutely anything) create a rock that is too heavy for them to lift? Consider it for a moment.

If you answer yes, they are no longer omnipotent because there is now something they cannot do, a rock they cannot lift. And if you say no, how can they be considered omnipotent if they can't do everything?

If we ever find this omnipotent being, perhaps they will also be omniscient (someone knowing everything) putting an end to this paradox. Until then, we'll keep looking.

The pursuit of knowledge, or learning, is an essential part of life. It is what has brought us to this point as a species. We observed the world around us, asked questions about how it works, received answers, and learned, or so the scientific method claims. But the truth is that by asking questions, we never learn anything new; we only learn answers that already existed. Socrates said it best:

"A man cannot look for what he knows or what he does not know." He can't look for what he knows because he already knows it, and he can't look for what he doesn't know because he doesn't know what to look for." Which is an odd quote because every scientific, technological, and philosophical breakthrough has resulted from asking questions, or has it?

And now about the title: This entire article is a lie.  

If that statement is true, then everything in this article is a lie, including that statement, which means everything in this article is true. But if everything in the article is true, then that statement must also be true, but if that statement is true, it isn’t.

You got it? Good.

Is anything I said true? Is anything truly real? I’ll let you decide on that one.