/sci/ - Science & Math

>>10672328
There are in fact certain paradoxes involved in the notion of a system that predicts its own behavior. These are reminiscent of Russell's Paradox in set theory and of the paradoxes that arise when one allows a statement to talk about itself (e.g., consider the statement, "This statement is false"). When a system makes a prediction about its own behavior, that prediction may itself change the behavior of the system, and the change in the behavior of the system may invalidate the prediction. Of course, not every statement that talks about itself is paradoxical. For example, the statement, "This statement is in the English language" makes perfectly good sense. Similarly, many predictions that a system may make about itself will not be self-invalidating; they may even cause the system to behave in such a way as to fulfill the prediction. But it is too much to hope for that a society's predictions about itself will never be (unexpectedly) self-invalidating.