Bookworm thoughtfully ponders conundrums

[bookworm]

This thread is being created to facilitate topics from this thread that don’t fit the confines there.
That thread is only for analysis of singular statements. This thread may be used to pose paradoxical conundrums for thoughtful discussion.

[Wooton Z. Bassett]

YAY!!
If someone with multiple personalities threatens to kill himself, is it considered a hostage situation?

Is there another word for synonym?

[bookworm]

If someone with multiple personalities threatens to kill himself, is it considered a hostage situation?

I would say no because it seems to me that would be a case of the currently dominant personality threatening suicide, which is a purely singular situation.

Is there another word for synonym?

According to my thesaurus, the words ‘substitute’ or ‘replacement’ are synonyms of synonym.

[Marvin D.]

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE ONETEEN AND TWOTEEN?

[bookworm]

Is there such a thing as infinity (in our natural world... Don't bring God into it this time, because we all know that God is infinite, etc.)?

As I said in the other thread, the concept of infinity is certainly real, as evidenced in the endlessness of numbers. If you’re looking for something more tangible though, as I believe you are with your choice of the word natural, that’s difficult to answer.
My initial response would be to say no, nothing is truly infinite. The reasoning being that time will eventually end, therefore everything else, regardless of longevity, will necessarily end as well. But then again, what is time? It’s a human invention. Even if there are no humans left to consciously mark the passing of time, the thing we denote as time is still present. So in that sense infinity is possible, because even if all life ends someday time itself will remain, even if no one is measuring it.
It would seem then to be impossible to say whether achieving infinity is possible. It would depend on what the end of time turns out to be. If it’s just an end to all life, then infinity can go on. But if it’s an end to all things, an annihilation of the entire universe into a vast nothingness, then even time itself would be destroyed, ending with it the count toward infinity.
Does that answer your question, or did I take it in a different direction than you had intended?

[Arkán Dreamwalker]

Here is something I have always made a study of, it's a time paradox.
A boy is back in time, with his grandmother, who has turned evil. The boy is going to kill her to stop her evil. This will, of course, result in his not being born. He is willing to sacrifice his existence to stop her evil. But. If he kills her, he will not be born. And if he is never born, he can't come back in time to kill his grandmother. So she lives. But if he doesn't kill her, then she doesn't die, and so he is born. And if he's born, then he comes back and kills her. But if he kills her, he won't be born. So he won't come back to kill her.
So it keeps going ad infinitum. This applies to other things too, I just used this one as an example. Can you think of a way out of this paradox? Or should mankind just never invent time-travel for fear of grinding history to a halt?

[bookworm]

Since time travel introduces a plethora of paradoxes, I’m hesitant to even attempt to analyze the one you present since I’m not sure what value the effort would have. The best solution in my mind would indeed be to simply not travel through time in the first place.

[Wooton Z. Bassett]

Funny you should bring this up, Arkan. Because just earlier today I wrote an article on time travel and posted it on the Soda shop MB. Come to think of it....you were on when I posted it. Did you steal my idea!? JK. Here's my article:
My Thoughts on Time Travel

Is time travel possible? Yes. It is a proven fact. Although during the process you would die before you went back or forward in time. Also, for an example, lets say you traveled back in time to kill your grandparents. If you were able to they wouldn't have given birth to your parents therefore your parents wouldn't have given birth to you. This would create a time paradox. If you succeeded and killed them you would be erased from existence. If you were, then who killed them? The answer: You did, although you were wiped from existence AFTER, this creates a time paradox where you kill you're grandparents in another time and paradox therefore getting trapped in that paradox and surviving. Moving on. Lets say you got caught in a time-space paradox in outer space. Would you get transported to another dimension of the same time he came from...or would the paradox lead nowhere and you would be trapped forever in the blackness of a time-space paradox. Since you are in a time-space paradox you defy age therefore being stuck there for eternity, being immortal since there is nothing else to kill you. Lets move on to a different, more simple idea. What if you were to travel from a black hole/time space paradox to either the past of future. You're molecules would have to get split up and rearranged once you arrive to your destination. But the odds are 9,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1 that you would survive because you're molecules could get arranged into...well....anything. Also, what if you got caught in a time loop. If you go to the past you will wait and wait and wait until you get back to the present. Then when you get back to the present, you're past self would go through the time loop and it would keep going to infinity making you immortal. And if you went through a time/space paradox or black hole there's no telling where in time you could end up. You could end up before the universe was created. But since there was nothing in existence (except for God) before the universe was created then there would be no place to time travel to therefore wiping you from existence. My conclusion is that time travel is possible, yet impossible. It exists, but without having a way to be able to recreate your molecules in the exact state they were before you time traveled you would not be able to live through the process.

[bookworm]

Is time travel possible? Yes. It is a proven fact.

It is?

[Wooton Z. Bassett]

Well, Albert Einstein brought it up as a theory and I believe NASA recently proved that there IS a time/space vortex/paradox

[Termite]

If it's possible, I have a feeling that God, being out of time, would keep the secret so hidden away that no one could discover it... He alone knows what will happen and when it will happen, and I doun't think He'd want some human taking control of the time vortex and manipulating history.

[Arkán Dreamwalker]

I concur that time-travel should never be invented. One, too dangerous, and two, It is not for humans and fundamentally imposable. (Meaning God would never let us do this.)

[Astronomer]

I have a question: Is it murder if a the man who died allows the "murderer" to kill him?

[Jesus' Princess]

I have a question: Is it murder if a the man who died allows the "murderer" to kill him?

Do you mean Physician assisted suicide, or something else?

[bookworm]

Is it murder if a the man who died allows the "murderer" to kill him?

That’s an interesting one.
By definition, yes it would be. Murder is when one person takes the life of another.
Morally, difficult to say. Most likely yes, because although there are situations that justify killing, I don’t see how one of those situations would be one where the other party had surrendered.
Legally, it probably depends on the circumstances. As JP mentioned, physician assisted suicide fits your description, but isn’t considered murder. Legally anyway, it technically still is.

[~JCGJ~]

Is there such a thing as infinity (in our natural world... Don't bring God into it this time, because we all know that God is infinite, etc.)?

As I said in the other thread, the concept of infinity is certainly real, as evidenced in the endlessness of numbers. If you’re looking for something more tangible though, as I believe you are with your choice of the word natural, that’s difficult to answer.
My initial response would be to say no, nothing is truly infinite. The reasoning being that time will eventually end, therefore everything else, regardless of longevity, will necessarily end as well. But then again, what is time? It’s a human invention. Even if there are no humans left to consciously mark the passing of time, the thing we denote as time is still present. So in that sense infinity is possible, because even if all life ends someday time itself will remain, even if no one is measuring it.
It would seem then to be impossible to say whether achieving infinity is possible. It would depend on what the end of time turns out to be. If it’s just an end to all life, then infinity can go on. But if it’s an end to all things, an annihilation of the entire universe into a vast nothingness, then even time itself would be destroyed, ending with it the count toward infinity.
Does that answer your question, or did I take it in a different direction than you had intended?

Well, most people think about infinity as being large, but could something be infinitely small?
Well (and please, let me know if you disagree), every tangible thing (whether it's a particle, or a rock, or even a gas or liquid) can be divided in half, which, in turn, could be divided in half again, etc.
You can also go into the half-lifes of different radio-active substances (ie. the amount of time it takes for half of the substance to deteriorate). Because it continues to lose matter (ie. the "halves" are continuosly getting smaller), the rate at which it deteriorates will decrease, but the substance will never dissappear completely, and the rate at which it deteriorates will never stop completely...
Or will it? Is there a point at which it stops, or does it continue to deteriorate into all eternity?

[bookworm]

Ah, I had addressed those kinds of topics in my response to your other question. I didn’t realize they went together, I thought they were posed separately.

Are there limits on how big or small something can get?

I’m not a scientist, so I don’t know if this is entirely accurate, but my thinking is as follows.
Yes, there is a limit to how small something can get. Because if you keep dividing something into smaller and smaller pieces, eventually the pieces would be so small they could not divide any further, and the next division would cause them to divide into nothing. At that point it would cease being whatever it was that was being made smaller, ergo it had reached the limit of smallness.
No, there is not a limit on how big something can get. I do not know of a practical example of something that gets substantially bigger over time, but let’s assume we have something for the sake of analysis. The only limit that could be placed on the growth of this thing would be the limit of space the thing has in which to grow. That limit, however, does not exist. If we assume this thing can grow larger than the earth and expand into outer space, it has all the area of the universe in which to continue growing bigger. The universe is expanding, meaning the area the thing can grow into is always increasing. Assuming the rate of the thing’s growth is slower than the rate of the universe’s expansion, there will always be more space into which the thing can expand, and therefore no limit on how big it can get.

Edit:

Well, most people think about infinity as being large, but could something be infinitely small?

I see what you mean now. When I hear ‘infinity’ I don’t think of something physical (infinitely big, infinitely small) I think of longevity (infinite passing of time), that’s why I had two completely different responses to your two questions.

[Woody]

Well, most people think about infinity as being large, but could something be infinitely small?
Well (and please, let me know if you disagree), every tangible thing (whether it's a particle, or a rock, or even a gas or liquid) can be divided in half, which, in turn, could be divided in half again, etc.
You can also go into the half-lifes of different radio-active substances (ie. the amount of time it takes for half of the substance to deteriorate). Because it continues to lose matter (ie. the "halves" are continuosly getting smaller), the rate at which it deteriorates will decrease, but the substance will never dissappear completely, and the rate at which it deteriorates will never stop completely...
Or will it? Is there a point at which it stops, or does it continue to deteriorate into all eternity?

Eventually, you would get down to the point where all that is left is one atom,(Not that you could divide something in half so many times that that's all that was left) and you wouldn't want to split that in half.

[Aaron Wiley]

I concur that time-travel should never be invented. One, too dangerous, and two, It is not for humans and fundamentally imposable. (Meaning God would never let us do this.)

[bookworm]

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE ONETEEN AND TWOTEEN?

They have never been widely used, so nothing ‘happened’ to them. But as for why we don’t use them, my research indicates that it’s because English (and other Germanic languages) were base twelve, meaning they have unique names counting up to twelve, then repeat.
The suffix -teen relates to the word ten, thus thirteen is three and ten. For eleven and twelve though, tracing them back to Old English and before, their suffixes mean left over, so eleven is one left over from the ten and twelve is two left over from the ten.