Сборник материалов международной научной конференции студентов, магистрантов, аспирантов

А.С. Елец

Республика Беларусь, Брест, БрГУ имени А.С. Пушкина

Научный руководитель – Л.М. Калилец

OMNIPOTENCE PARADOX

Logic is whatever university student must have and develop. It is in our case not a study, but rather the use of reason.

This is a basic example of using logic: “Water is liquid. Liquids can leak. So, water can leak”. This is also an illustration of using deductive reasoning, which is, to say it simply, a part of logic.

“If plants are usually green and spruces are plants, then spruces are most likely to be green”. “Bricks are thicker than wood, so they are the better construction material than wood if you want a warm house” – not very difficult to figure out, is it? But how about this: “If a being is omnipotent, can it create a stone so heavy that it cannot lift it?” This is a question that expresses the omnipotence paradox, one of the most famous logical paradoxes. More precisely, it expresses one of the cases of that paradox. This question generates a dilemma. The being can either create a stone which it cannot lift, or it cannot create a stone which it cannot lift. If the being can create such stone, then it seems it will stop being omnipotent. If the being cannot create a stone which it cannot lift, then it seems it is already not omnipotent.

At first this question may seem impossible to answer in the right way, but actually if you think about it a little, the question will gain more sense… But more will pop up. How do you understand the word “omnipotent”? Must the stone be heavy, or something else? Why would the being need such a stone? And… Can this being give omnipotence to another being? Can this another being defeat the first being later? Can the being better itself with its power to perfection, making itself infinitely beautiful, smart, knowledgeable, etc.? Many questions can be thought of.

An interesting consensus proceeds from the most basic understanding of the word “omnipotent” – the one that sounds as “able to do anything”. Just this very explanation answers many of the questions above – thinking logically while using such explanation, the being can create such a stone, give omnipotence to some other being, etc. Basically, limit, transfer, copy-paste, forfeit its power. And while the last one is totally understandable in this way: the being in question just refuses its power and is left without it, the rest are to be argued upon. For example, if the being limits its power by creating a stone it can’t lift, can’t it cancel the limit later? And if it creates such stone and makes itself unable to cancel the order, can’t it just make a new order to cancel the previous one, and so on? Well, basically, it all depends on the being’s imagination. So let’s personify this being.

Imagine it’s human. So this human can do anything, and how does he do it? By imagining things, or giving his aim the right wording for it to work, or maybe taking things from others, imaginations. But our imaginations aren’t endless. We can’t imagine a 4D or 5D form, for instance. So how will the omnipotent now person cope with it?

Generally we can pinpoint two ways, one of which implies not getting worried about being unable to widen their imagination beyond human level and the other involves finding ways to do it – expand the imagination.

And how does the human do that? Human brain is very complex, mostly undiscovered and has great potential, bit it is nevertheless not limitless. And while the person can do it the hard way by exercising the brain, and/or adding extra potential, a bit like we upgrade our computers for example, and/or looking for a way to remove the limits of brain somehow, the easy way is to just wish: “I want to be able to imagine anything”. But will the person still be human after that easy way, or perhaps even the “hard” ways? As being able to imagine anything will require wide possibilities of their mind, wider than any human’s. It’s even hard to imagine such a mind, combined with the imagination, and how it would work. Will it be able to think and operate beyond logic, like solving a case with no clues at all, and even no information about it? To us this seems absurd, as if we needed to somehow find out the question and then the answer to that question without any indications what they might be.

Although that’s what we’re doing – trying to find the answer to a question by logic, and failing, as the question itself is just… incomprehensible to logic. It’s like solving an equation “2x = 4; x² = 7” – it simply has no answer that we can deduce with the existing information. We simply need to widen our minds to the next level of logic and/or beyond it, as for now we’re biting off what we can’t chew.

For example the above-mentioned equation can be solved by changing the meaning of x, making it “any number from 2 to 3” literally, or in other words, making the x itself an interval from which we can choose any number; or by adding that x-s do not need to be equal; or by making the symbol “7” the new number four. But how is it applicable to the omnipotence paradox? Most likely by no or little known to the society means for now, as we’re still underdeveloped. So let’s hope this will change in the future and, of course, contribute to it.

1. 
   Omnipotence paradox [Electronic resource] // Rational Wiki. – Mode of access: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Omnipotence_paradox. – Date of access: 14.03.2015.
   
2. 
   Omnipotence [Electronic resource] // Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. – Mode of access: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/omnipotence/. – Date of access: 19.03.2015.
   
3. 
   Tompson, J. S. History of Paradox / J. S. Tompson. – 2004. – P. 47.
   
4. 
   Goldman, A. Logical Observations / A. Goldman // Rationalities. –2010. – № 8.
   

Статья посвящена одному из известных логических парадоксов – парадоксу всемогущества. Автор выражает своё мнение по поводу претворения данного парадокса в реальность и предполагает необходимые условия для разрешения сформированной на основе данного парадокса знаменитой задачи.