Re: Riddles (was: Lateral Thinking)

From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Mon Jan 01 2001 - 23:10:46 MST


Damien Broderick wrote:
>
> At 11:59 PM 1/01/01 -0500, Eliezer wrote:
>
> >Damien, I cannot make out *what* the heck you are talking about. And
> >consider the source.
>
> I'm terribly, terribly tempted to reply: The riddle is a meta-riddle. It's
> not actually a riddle. The riddle is its
> own solution.

Think of it as a Typeless Riddle, if you prefer. Or if you're too strict
a set-theoretician, consider it to be a Godelian Riddle, or rather, half
of a Godelian Riddle. If you're really, really strict, you can consider
the complete riddle-and-answer pair to be a Henkin Riddle. Neither Godel
nor Henkin statements are paradoxical, nor, strictly speaking,
self-referential; both Godel and Henkin statements are accepted parts of
mathematics and are, in fact, always true, so I really fail to see your
objection here...

-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence



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