A paradox is a logical puzzler that contradicts itself in a baffling way. "This statement is false" is a classic example, known to logicians as "the liar's paradox." Paradoxical statements may seem completely self-contradictory, but they can be used to reveal deeper truths.
The grandfather paradox is a potential logical problem that would arise if a person were to travel to a past time. The name comes from the idea that if a person travels to a time before their grandfather had children, and kills him, it would make their birth impossible.
The more you learn, the more you realize how little you know. The old Socrates adage. Every time you gain a greater understanding, it creates even more questions than it answers.
These are examples of paradoxes, another popular example of a paradox is The trolley problem is a thought experiment in ethics about a fictional scenario in which an onlooker has the choice to save 5 people in danger of being hit by a trolley, by diverting the trolley to kill just 1 person. The dilemma allows us to think through the consequences of an action and consider whether its moral value is determined solely by its outcome.
What shall you do, shall you sacrifice one person to save five? It's popular because it forces us to think about how to choose when there are no good choices. Do we pick the action with the best outcome or stick to a moral code that prohibits causing someone's death?
In one survey about 90% of respondents said that it's okay to flip the switch letting one worker die to save five and other studies including a virtual reality simulation of the dilemma has found similar results these judgments are consistent with the philosophical principle of utilitarianism which argues that the morally correct decision is the one that maximizes well-being for the greatest number of people the five lives outweigh one even if achieving that outcome requires condemning someone to die but people don't always take the utilitarian view which we can see by changing the trolley problem a bit this time you're standing on a bridge over the track as the runaway trolley approaches now there's no second track but there is a very large man on the bridge next to you if you push him over his body will stop the trolley saving the five workers but he'll die to Utilitarians the decision is the same lose one life to save five but in this case, only about 10% of people say that it's okay to throw the man onto the tracks our instincts tell us that deliberately causing someone's death is different than allowing them to die as collateral damage.
It just feels wrong, this intersection between ethics and psychology is what's so interesting about the trolley problem. The dilemma and its many variations reveal that what we think is right or wrong depends on factors other than a logical weighing of the pros and cons.
Some philosophers and psychologists argue that it doesn't reveal anything because its premise is so unrealistic that study participants don't take it seriously but new technology is making this kind of ethical analysis more important than ever for example driverless cars may have to handle choices like causing a small accident to prevent a larger one meanwhile governments are researching autonomous military drones that could wind up making decisions of whether they'll risk civilian casualties to attack a high-value target if we want these actions to be ethical we have to decide in advance how to value human life and judge the greater good so researchers who study autonomous systems are collaborating with philosophers to address a complex problem of programming ethics into machines which goes to show that even hypothetical dilemmas can wind up on a collision course with the real world.
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