If I say: “I always lie” – am I then lying, or not? If the sentence “I always lie” is true, then it should not be true, because I always lie. If the sentence is not true, this would translate into “I never lie”, But in this case I lied to you, and we again have a contradiction. This is an example of a paradox. A paradox is a statement which contradicts itself. In this episode I’d like to show you a few other examples of paradoxes. Just for the fun of it.

Once there was a crocodile, which stole a child. The mother talked to the crocodile and the crocodile said that it will return the child to the mother if she answers to a question correctly. If the answer is wrong, then the crocodile would eat the child. The mother agreed. The crocodile now asked the question: “What am I going to do next?”. What should the mother answer? If she says: “You are not going to eat my child.”, then the crocodile would respond: “Wrong answer, I would have eaten the child, and now I’m really going to eat it because your answer was wrong”. What’s going to happen if the mother answered: “You are going to eat my child.”. The question is now: Should the crocodile now eat the child or not? If the answer is correct, then the crocodile promised to return the child. But this would make the answer wrong again. If the crocodile really intended to eat the child, he has to return it, but at the same time can’t do that because then the answer would be wrong again. Continue reading »