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From: dxm@lanl.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.startrek
Subject: Mudd & Norman and boy did I goof
Message-ID: <24665@lanl.ARPA>
Date: Wed, 17-Apr-85 21:00:15 EST
Article-I.D.: lanl.24665
Posted: Wed Apr 17 21:00:15 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 20-Apr-85 05:49:16 EST
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Organization: Los Alamos National Laboratory
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      My last posting got munged horribly, sorry about that.
    Here it is as it should be ( I hope ).


>An inconsistency in a particular episode that has always bothered me goes
>back to "I, Mudd", the one with Norman and the 300,000 Androids.
>One of the gems of logic that the gang uses to overwhelm the Androids is:
>     Kirk: "Everything Harry Mudd tells you is a lie."
>     Mudd: "Norman, I am lying now."
>This blows Norman away!  It seems to me that the flaw in the logic is what
>if Kirk is lying?
>
>--Evan Marcus
>...{decvax|ucbvax}!vax135!petsd!pedsgd!pedsga!evan

       Actually, no flaws here.  Kirk's statement is pretty much 
    irrelevant.  Norman will still blow a fuse, because Mudd's 
    statement is a paradox all by it's lonesome.  Try it; if Mudd
    is really lying, then his statement is false, so he is not
    lying ( ouch !).  If he is telling the truth, then he is doing
    what he says he is; lying ( also ouch ).  This is also called
    a "strange loop" by Douglas Hofstatder, who wrote a *very* good 
    book called _Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid_ that 
    discusses such things in depth.  It is very readable, and utterly
    fascinating ( couldn't resist a plug here, I love this book ).
    Anyway, it turns out that you need a meta-language to handle
    paradoxes; that is, a language that refers to the language in
    which the paradox exists.  Of course, paradoxes in the meta-
    language are resolved with meta-meta-languages, etc.
       If Norman is crashed this easily, one wonders how he survived
    3,745,386 years...

                                          Doug Miller

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