Create Your Own Adventure-Jack Humphries

1) If you could know EVERYTHING would you want to?

2) Would you choose immortality.

3) What do you make of "This this statement is a lie"

Although both prompts 1 and 2 challenge the fundamental logic of humanity, I feel the age old paradox of prompt number 3 is much more intriguing. 

This literary monkey wrench has thwarted many philosophers who have attempt to clarify its paradoxical nature. But from it's first iteration (coming from the clever Cretan Epimendes who proclaimed "All Cretans are liars") up to present day versions like "This this statement is a lie" , no philosopher has successfully come to terms with the Liar paradox.

"Who cares?" you may ask, well I assure you this paradox is much more significant than the trivial nuisance many see it for. Fundamentally, the heart of the problem lies in the phrase's universal taboo: Self-awareness. If I knew nothing about myself, and only could perceive the action of others then I would be completely incapable of producing the Liar paradox. In other words by gaining self awareness, I gain the ability to contradict my self. This tricky trait isn't just found in humans though, it is also found in the world of Mathematics.

During the early 1900's mathematicians were hard at work trying to "fix" math. What was the problem with math? Well a mathematical form of the liars paradox kept on surfacing which had mathematicians convinced that the system of mathematics they had been using was broken. In 1910 an ironclad system of math was released called Principia Mathematica. The founders of this new system claimed that they had removed the pesky problem of self awareness, and thus removed the Liars paradox from math. Sadly they were wrong, and a brilliant Austrian mathematician named Gödel proved the new system was flawed. In fact Gödel proved that in any system of mathematics complex enough to be useful would contain some element of self reference and therefore the liars paradox. Thus from this one "trivial" statement we have learned that we can not know everything, and that no matter how hard we try some paradoxes are unsolvable.