What if someone told you that your success is an outcome of your luck? Is that enough for you to lash out and explain how your hard work and dedication have gotten you to the position where you are right now? What if I told you that your success is indeed a product of two contradictions? So why is the nature of your success contradictory? Before you could understand that, let's take a couple of minutes to get to know these contradictions. Contradiction 1: Your belief that it's your hard work and countless sleepless nights that have abled you to climb that success ladder and stand at the top. But, on the other hand, Contradiction 2: Your awareness that Contradiction 1 is a lie and your luck has played an important role in getting you where you are. This antithetical concept is the Success Paradox. But why does your success require to be paradoxical? The truth is, it doesn't. But it's the best approach that one should take to remain in touch with reality. It is human natu...
This is possibly
the first thing that comes to mind when it registers the word, Paradox! The
Grandfather Paradox is, virtually speaking, maybe the grandfather of
all the paradoxes. This is because it deals with the most complex and most
convoluted concept of all time, Time!
As I mentioned in
one of the previous episodes, "Time is the
continued sequence of existence and events that occur in an apparently
irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the
future." and time is something not to be messed with. Did your mother ever
tell you not to play with that one kid who used to bully everyone? Well, consider
time to be this kid's arrogant, grumpy, and angry grandfather. You wanna play
with him? Consider yourself doomed.
So,
what is the Grandfather Paradox? Let's take an example, imagine that your
grandfather accumulated a fortune of a thousand lifetimes during his life, and
now it was your turn to inherit it all. On the day of announcing his will, you
find out that your name has not been included in it. You are out. Nothing for
your poor dandy soul. Now you're furious; you're planning to bring this fury to
its end and unleash the doom on your grandfather once and for all. You walk
into the basement and stumble across an antique-looking box. You open the box,
and it says, "Temporal Sneak!" (More about this in my
upcoming book entitled, "Everything and Darren Grimes: The Cosmic
Consciousness & the Afterlife.")
You realise that
you just found a time machine for yourself. You could use it to go back to the
past and charm your grandfather so as to make him include you in his final
will. But, you are furious... you wanna put some dirt in your grandfather's
eyes. You decide to go back to the time when your grandfather was of your age
and was unmarried. This means that your father hadn't been born yet. You start
the time machine and are about to leave. You see a gun nearby and grab it in
anger. You travel back to the time when your grandfather was young and naive
like you, and you point the gun at him and kill him.
Congratulations!
You have successfully started the Grandfather Paradox. There are two courses of
action and five primary stages under each course of action.
Course of Action
1.
Stage 1 - You
exist.
Stage 2 - You
travel back to time.
Stage 3 - You
shoot your grandfather.
Stage 4 - Your
grandfather dies.
Stage 5 - You were
never born!
So you've done
your work up to Stage 2. Now your grandfather is critical, he is being taken to
the hospital, but he doesn't make it. You start to feel butterflies in your
stomach. Everything is dizzy. Something's not right. You realise what you've
done. By killing your grandfather, you've prevented your father from being
born. And if your father didn't exist, how could you exist? And if you didn't exist,
how could you travel back in time and kill your grandfather?
Welcome to the
Second Course of Action.
Stage 1 - You do
not exist.
Stage 2 - You do
not travel back in time.
Stage 3 - You do
not kill your grandfather, and hence, your grandfather lives!
Stage 4 - Your
grandfather lives, your father was born, and in turn, you were born.
Stage 5 - You
exist.
Stage 5 of the
Second Course of Action and Stage 1 of the First Course of Action are the same,
and they are shared in order to make an infinite loop of "Life &
Existence" and "Killing & Non-Existence."
Explained simply;
The Grandfather Paradox
Once you jump into the time machine and execute Stage 1, there is no going back. You are stuck in an infinite loop of time where you exist and don't exist simultaneously. And this is not the scary part! The scary part comes each time you kill your grandfather and realise what you've done because at this point, you are aware of your mistake but there is nothing you can do to prevent it because, in a matter of seconds, you will cease to exist. And when the loop reaches Stage 1 of the First Course of Action, you shall have no recollection of the events that happened in the previous cycle and you will commit this mistake over and over again till the end of time. This is the scary part, you will never have an idea that you are stuck in a time loop.
This is the Grandfather Paradox. The ultimate time loop of doom.
So, does it mean that there is no way to break this paradox? Well, if you're thinking linearly, then there is absolutely no chance of you to figure out a way to break through this infinite loop. But, if we bend our thinking for a second and hop into the boat of lateral thinking, we just might arrive at a solution for this.
Like every other paradox, there are ways to work around this one as well. Ready to save our hypothetical grandfather killer?
Solution #1: One way to break the infinite time
loop of this paradox is to forget that you're living in the universe. What? How
can you not live in the universe? Well, that's because you just made yourself a
part of a Multiverse! This makes things easy, once you become
a part of a multiverse, you can hop into your time machine and unleash all
sorts of chaos in the universe without worrying about the repercussions of
anything. This is because the multiverse allows Inter-Universal Time
Travel. You travel into the past and kill your grandfather but, that
past is not the one where you were born. This past is the past of an alternate
timeline of an alternate universe that is distinct from your own universe. This
means that anything you do in this timeline will have no impact on your
original timeline. So, you can carry out your devious revenge and come back to
your original timeline to have a sip of pina colada after a long day of work.
-What? You don't like it?
One Random Brain Cell (ORBC) of Mine: This is a
workaround to the paradox but not a solution per se.
Me: What else do you want?
ORBC: Give me wings!
~One RedBull later!~
ORBC: What if, we apply quantum superpositioning?
Solution #2: Quantum Superpositioning, or commonly known as Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment, is a phenomenon that argues that subatomic particles do certain things in parallel. Schrodinger's cat is alive and dead at the same time (Not gonna get in much detail in here as even I don't understand it properly).
What if the entire universe was in a quantum superposition of grandfather lives and grandfather dies? If this is the case, it would mean that our psychotic grandson is also in a superposition of existence and non-existence at the same time. This would denote that the universe is consistent in superposition and there is no paradox whatsoever. We would just experience one of the realities out of the two! (special thanks to Minute Physics).
-You happy now?
ORBC: Maybe I am also in the superposition of being happy and unhappy at the same time!
Grandfather Paradox is one of the most talked-about paradoxes of all time. Not because there is a fascination for the psychotic grandson but because it is the tendency of the human mind to produce a simple yet complicated problem and think of a solution in a linear fashion.
Maybe I am also in the superposition of writing this article and not writing this article at the same time. And this concludes episode one of season two of the NotionWave Podcast. Till we witness one of the realities unfolding themselves in front of our eyes, keep reading NotionWave.
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I also have a book entitled, "Everything and Darren Grimes - The Cosmic Consciousness & the Afterlife." under the works. It's going to launch in the middle of December 2021 on Amazon, Flipkart and Ingram. Support the work by purchasing a copy and preordering it as soon as it becomes available.
Book Blurb:-
He is dead! And that's where the story begins. With the help of a soul reaper named Walden, he embarks on a journey to explore hell, heaven and much more and to uncover the mysteries revolving around his birth and an uncanny demise. In search of the purpose of his existence, a destruction mongering nightmare is unleashed from the past. What does it want? Is there an end to this nightmare? Will Darren be able to define a purpose for his existence? Dive into a world where death is just another beginning and find out. Everything and Darren Grimes! Mysteries of the Cosmic Consciousness, Death and the Afterlife.
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