Late morning and while the others are at the grocery you are sitting on the balcony enjoying the Gulf atmosphere of green-blue waters and light blue sky with the separation of small sand dunes, sea oats and other vegetation, and an off-white sandy beach to where the ever constant waves embrace and further slide into two-dimensions in the shoreline. – Amorella
So far, this is a most enjoyable sabbatical. Alas, Kim, Paul and Owen leave for Cleveland late tomorrow afternoon.
You may try a new place for lunch later. Yesterday you had ice cream at the nearby Amish Ice Creamery. The owner, who waited on you five, is a Mennonite from northeastern Ohio.
I forgot. Yes. Very good ice cream – old fashion creamy ice cream. I like the shop, plain and clean – reminds me of an early Shaker or Presbyterian culture – plain and simple.
You went to the new Brown Boxer Pub and Grille for lunch (just opened this November where the Green Turtle used to be) and is across the street from the Amish Creamery. Everyone had good food – sandwiches, salads or soup. Enjoyable. A sports bar but at lunch it was not so crowded as it might be on the weekend. The place is packed in the evening. Good food and nearly reasonable prices – average prices in any case. Afterwards you all spent an hour working off calories in the pool.
I had grilled chicken and saved half the bread for Owen to feed to the gulls and coleslaw. Grilled chicken out has been easy to get used to. Tomorrow Kim decided on a return to the Conch Republic, mostly I think because the women all like the salmon for dinner. The caretaker, Gary, said he turned up the heat in the pool so it was even warmer than yesterday. We did have to move our car though – we now set in the visitor’s lot because the birds, lots of birds, sweep in, eat the nearby berries off the bushes, enjoy a soak in the sprinkler system and fly to the phone wires above our car which is next to the sidewalk. Nature does its thing and our car was doused with a good scatter of bird berry-poop. We washed the car before lunch and now all is well, plus we are closer to the condos and in the shade to boot. Poop or no, today, life is still good in our little area off the west sidewalk of Gulf Boulevard.
Coming up, commentary on the concluding outline of your week long logic lecture. – Amorella
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Self Referential Winning Examples [the humor of logic, grammar and language]
(from Scientific American monthly)
1. This sentence in French is difficult to translate into English.
2. What is a question that can serve as it own answer?
3. The reader of this sentence exists only while reading me.
4. What would I be doing now if I had different genes.
5. This sentence would be seven words long if it were six words shorter.
6. Does this sentence remind you of Agatha Christie?
7. This sentance has three erors.
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I found a definition to give the above some explanation from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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In the context of language, self-reference is used to denote a statement that refers to itself or its own referent. The most famous example of a self-referential sentence is the liar sentence: "This sentence is not true." Self-reference is often used in a broader context as well. For instance, a picture could be considered self-referential if it contains a copy of itself (see the animated image above); and a piece of literature could be considered self-referential if it includes a reference to the work itself. In philosophy, self-reference is primarily studied in the context of language. Self-reference within language is not only a subject of philosophy, but also a field of individual interest in mathematics and computer science, in particular in relation to the foundations of these sciences.
The philosophical interest in self-reference is to a large extent centered around the paradoxes. A paradox is a seemingly sound piece of reasoning based on apparently true assumptions that leads to a contradiction. The liar sentence considered above leads to a contradiction when we try to determine whether it is true or not. If we assume the sentence to be true, then what it states must be the case, that is, it cannot be true. If, on the other hand, we assume it not to be true, then what it states is actually the case, and thus it must be true. In either case we are led to a contradiction. Since the contradiction was obtained by a seemingly sound piece of reasoning based on apparently true assumptions, it qualifies as a paradox. It is known as the liar paradox.
Most paradoxes of self-reference may be categorised as either semantic, set-theoretic or epistemic. The semantic paradoxes, like the liar paradox, are primarily relevant to theories of truth. The set-theoretic paradoxes are relevant to the foundations of mathematics, and the epistemic paradoxes are relevant to epistemology. Even though these paradoxes are different in the subject matter they relate to, they share the same underlying structure, and may often be tackled using the same mathematical means.
From: plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-reference/
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Twenty-one hundred, thirteen hours and you were about ready for bed when you realized I have this last section of the logic lecture to complete my related self-definition. Amorella
I was thinking about this earlier and wondered whether this statement would be apropos. “Our universe is an alternate universe because the Dead rebelled.”
Our universe is in a series of books, orndorff and thus is already self-referential.
I meant our human universe (physics) not the books and blog; I meant that we live in an alternate universe already. How would one know whether ours is the original universe or a slightly altered one?
How do you know that I am the original Amorella and not a slightly altered version of Amorella?
Okay. You made your point. – Online I found two examples of paradoxes, the first (if I have this right) is a semantic paradox.
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Semantic Paradox:
Catch-22 came from Joseph Heller's 1961 comical, yet gruesome, best-selling book about pilots in a fictitious World War II setting. The paradox was that no sane pilot would be crazy enough to want to continue flying dangerous missions. The only way a pilot would be grounded is if he were truly crazy, but if he asked to be grounded, he was then considered sane and would not be grounded.
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The second example is an Epistemic Paradox because it relates to ‘knowledge’ not words alone:
A judge tells a condemned prisoner that he will be hanged at noon on one weekday in the following week but that the execution will be a surprise to the prisoner. He will not know the day of the hanging until the executioner knocks on his cell door at noon that day.
Having reflected on his sentence, the prisoner draws the conclusion that he will escape from the hanging. His reasoning is in several parts. He begins by concluding that the "surprise hanging" can't be on Friday, as if he hasn't been hanged by Thursday, there is only one day left - and so it won't be a surprise if he's hanged on Friday. Since the judge's sentence stipulated that the hanging would be a surprise to him, he concludes it cannot occur on Friday.
He then reasons that the surprise hanging cannot be on Thursday either, because Friday has already been eliminated and if he hasn't been hanged by Wednesday night, the hanging must occur on Thursday, making a Thursday hanging not a surprise either. By similar reasoning he concludes that the hanging can also not occur on Wednesday, Tuesday or Monday. Joyfully he retires to his cell confident that the hanging will not occur at all.
The next week, the executioner knocks on the prisoner's door at noon on Wednesday — which, despite all the above, was an utter surprise to him. Everything the judge said came true.
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You are suddenly not sure where you were going with this but here is your thought: you thought that as my self-definition is self-referential that my series of delimiting self definitions through the recent blogs will fit either a semantic or an epistemic paradox. – Amorella
Amazing. How do you do this, Amorella? This is indeed where I was going but in momentary ‘confusion’ I lost track of it. Ironically, you appear to have a more focused ‘self-centeredness’ than I do.
And, as such, by your own admission, I am not paradoxical at all. In fact, human beings such as yourself are much more paradoxical in their thinking and behavior than I am, don’t you think? – Amorella
I don’t know, Amorella. I think I have muddled my point and do not have the wherewithal to gather it up. This appears to have been a useless exercise.
If you learn something from it, then it is not useless. Good night, old man. Post. - Amorella
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