What paradox states that an entirely rational ass placed between two stacks of hay of equal quality will starve as it cannot make any rational decision to start eating one rather than the other?
"equally compelling cannot be fully rational: Other writers have opted to deny the validity of the illustration. A typical counter-argument is that rationality as described in the paradox is so limited as to be a straw man version of the real thing, which does allow the consideration of meta-arguments. In other words, it is entirely rational to recognize that both choices are equally good and arbitrarily (randomly) pick one instead of starving; although the decision that they are sufficiently the same is also subject to Buridan's ass. The idea that a random decision could be made is sometimes used as"
"choose between the two, dies of hunger. The paradox is named after the 14th-century French philosopher Jean Buridan, whose philosophy of moral determinism it satirizes. Although the illustration is named after Buridan, philosophers have discussed the concept before him, notably Aristotle who used the example of a man equally hungry and thirsty, and Al-Ghazali who used a man faced with the choice of equally good dates. A version of this situation appears as metastability in digital electronics, when a circuit must decide between two states based on an input that is in itself undefined (neither zero nor one). Metastability becomes"
"equally good alternatives Buridan believed a rational choice could not be made. Later writers satirised this view in terms of an ass which, confronted by both food and water, must necessarily die of both hunger and thirst while pondering a decision. Some proponents of hard determinism have granted the unpleasantness of the scenario, but have denied that it illustrates a true paradox, since one does not contradict oneself in suggesting that a man might die between two equally plausible routes of action. For example, in his ""Ethics"", Benedict de Spinoza suggests that a person who sees two options as truly"
"to believe that the donkey would die, because he has no autonomy. The donkey is incapable of forming a rational decision as there is no motive to choose one bale of hay over the other. However, human beings are different, because a human who is placed in a position where he is forced to choose one loaf of bread over another will make a decision to take one in lieu of the other. For Buridan, humans have the capacity of autonomy, and he recognises the choice that is ultimately made will be based on chance, as both loaves of bread"
"never be eaten at the same meal because the body uses alkaline enzymes to digest carbohydrates whereas acids work on proteins. Thus, if a person ate both types of foods together, the alkalines and acids would neutralize one another, the stomach would be unable to digest anything, and the food would simply rot in the intestines... His theory was exposed as flawed because the alkaline enzymes operate in one part of the intestine and the acids in another. Hay's dieting ideas have received continual criticism over lack of a scientific basis. However, the Hay diet and its variants, such as"
"The Ass and the Pig The Ass and the Pig is one of Aesop's Fables (Perry Index 526) that was never adopted in the West but has Eastern variants that remain popular. Their general teaching is that the easy life and seeming good fortune of others conceal a threat to their welfare. The earliest Latin version of this tale is in a poem by Phaedrus and concerns a pig that was fattened on barley and then sacrificed. The left-over grain was given to the ass, who refused it because of the fate that had overtaken the one it had previously"
"hunger. Lying at the back of it, and the associated lesson that a person's basic nature cannot be changed, is one of the proverbs of Ahiqar, Aesop's Near Eastern counterpart. 'If water would stand still in heaven, and a black crow become white, and myrrh grow sweet as honey, then ignorant men and fools might understand and become wise.' In the later context of the slave trade and the racial mixing that followed, the proverbial phrase was given a new meaning. So it is recorded that, in Barbados, 'where you find a European and an African mating, the product was"
"should be of his opinion is much more stupid and unreasonable than the ass in the fable'. More or less this wording was to be repeated from collection to collection for the next two centuries, while the former emblematic meaning was forgotten. An ass eating thistles Developed by authors during Renaissance times, the story of an ass eating thistles was a late addition to collections of Aesop's Fables. Beginning as a condemnation of miserly behaviour, it eventually was taken to demonstrate how preferences differ. Two Greek poems from the 2nd century CE seem to have contributed to the making of"
"The Ant and the Grasshopper The Ant and the Grasshopper, alternatively titled The Grasshopper and the Ant (or Ants), is one of Aesop's Fables, numbered 373 in the Perry Index. The fable describes how a hungry grasshopper begs for food from an ant when winter comes and is refused. The situation sums up moral lessons about the virtues of hard work and planning for the future. Even in Classical times, however, the advice was mistrusted and an alternative story represented the ant's industry as mean and self-serving. Jean de la Fontaine's delicately ironical retelling in French later widened the debate"
"and the Country Mouse. The Ass and the Pig The Ass and the Pig is one of Aesop's Fables (Perry Index 526) that was never adopted in the West but has Eastern variants that remain popular. Their general teaching is that the easy life and seeming good fortune of others conceal a threat to their welfare. The earliest Latin version of this tale is in a poem by Phaedrus and concerns a pig that was fattened on barley and then sacrificed. The left-over grain was given to the ass, who refused it because of the fate that had overtaken the"
"Buttered cat paradox The buttered cat paradox is a common joke based on the tongue-in-cheek combination of two adages: The paradox arises when one considers what would happen if one attached a piece of buttered toast (butter side up) to the back of a cat, then dropped the cat from a large height. The buttered cat paradox, submitted by artist John Frazee of Kingston, New York, won a 1993 ""OMNI"" magazine competition about paradoxes. The basic premise, stating the conditions of the cat and bread and posed as a question, was presented in a routine by comic and juggler Michael"
"same illustration and titled ""The Ass eating Thistles"". There an ass carrying all sorts of food to the harvesters himself chews on a thistle 'and while he was doing so he entered into this reflection: How many greedy epicures would think themselves happy, amidst such a variety of delicate viands as I now carry! But to me this bitter, prickly Thistle is more savory and relishing than the most exquisite and sumptuous banquet.' In addressing the moral lesson to be learned, Croxall quotes the English proverb 'One man's meat is another man's poison' and concludes 'he that expects all mankind"
"The Fly and the Ant The Fly and the Ant is one of Aesop’s Fables that appears in the form of a debate between the two insects. It is numbered 521 in the Perry Index. In the fable as recounted by Phaedrus, the fly claims precedence since it tastes sacrifices even before the gods, and in the human sphere perches on crowned heads and makes free with any woman. The ant argues that taking liberties without a prior invitation proves nothing. Working for the common good is the true measure of worth, not vainglory, and winter will be the final"
"but related a rather different tale in which an ass finds its way through a cracked wall to a stack of corn and is counselled by a mouse when it cannot get out. In England the story was adapted by A. A. Milne as the second chapter in his ""Winnie-the-Pooh"" (1926) 'in which Pooh goes visiting and gets into a tight place'. In this case, the bear overindulges in honey and condensed milk while visiting Rabbit and becomes stuck when trying to exit the burrow. It takes a week of starvation before he can be extricated. The Fox and the"
"Then one person asked him what would happen if he were to take his spear to strike his shield; the seller could not answer. This led to the idiom of """"zìxīang máodùn"""" (自相矛盾, ""from phrase spear shield""), or ""self-contradictory"". Another ancient and mythological example illustrating this theme can be found in the story of the Teumessian fox, who can never be caught, and the hound Laelaps, who never misses what it hunts. Realizing the paradox, Zeus turns both creatures into static stars. The problems associated with this paradox can be applied to any other conflict between two abstractly defined extremes"
"the floor in 81% of cases. Buttered cat paradox The buttered cat paradox is a common joke based on the tongue-in-cheek combination of two adages: The paradox arises when one considers what would happen if one attached a piece of buttered toast (butter side up) to the back of a cat, then dropped the cat from a large height. The buttered cat paradox, submitted by artist John Frazee of Kingston, New York, won a 1993 ""OMNI"" magazine competition about paradoxes. The basic premise, stating the conditions of the cat and bread and posed as a question, was presented in a"
"Apportionment paradox An apportionment paradox exists when the rules for apportionment in a political system produce results which are unexpected or seem to violate common sense. To apportion is to divide into parts according to some rule, the rule typically being one of proportion. Certain quantities, like milk, can be divided in any proportion whatsoever; others, such as horses, cannot—only whole numbers will do. In the latter case, there is an inherent tension between the desire to obey the rule of proportion as closely as possible and the constraint restricting the size of each portion to discrete values. This results,"
"this an inference of the mind. Human beings assess a situation based upon certain predetermined events and from that form a choice. Hume believes that this choice is made spontaneously. Hume calls this form of decision making the liberty of spontaneity. Education writer Richard Wright considers that Hume's position rejects a famous moral puzzle attributed to French philosopher Jean Buridan. The Buridan's ass puzzle describes a donkey that is hungry. This donkey has on both sides of him separate bales of hay, which are of equal distances from him. The problem concerns which bale the donkey chooses. Buridan was said"
"an infinite demand are assumed. The problem is how to design a discipline of behavior (a concurrent algorithm) such that no philosopher will starve; ""i.e."", each can forever continue to alternate between eating and thinking, assuming that no philosopher can know when others may want to eat or think. The problem was designed to illustrate the challenges of avoiding deadlock, a system state in which no progress is possible. To see that a proper solution to this problem is not obvious, consider a proposal in which each philosopher is instructed to behave as follows: This attempted solution fails because it"
"the morning and then of incest with its sisters and daughters. In both cases the cock answers that humanity benefits by its activities. But the cat ends the argument by remarking that it is now her breakfast time and ""Cats don't live on dialogues"". Underlying both these fables is a Latin proverb, variously expressed, that ""an empty belly has no ears"" or, as the Spanish equivalent has it, """"Lobo hambriento no tiene asiento"""" (a hungry wolf doesn't hang about). The fable also has Eastern analogues. One of these is the Buddhist ""Dipi Jataka"" in which the protagonists are a panther"
"written by a high-school friend that explored the potential implications of the cat and buttered toast idea. The faux paradox has captured the imagination of science-oriented humorists. In May 1992, the Usenet Oracle Digest #441 included a question from a supplicant asking about the paradox. Testing the theory is the main theme in an episode of the comic book strip ""Jack B. Quick"", the title character seeks to test this theory, leading to the cat hovering above the ground, with the cat's wagging tail providing propulsion. The March 31, 2005, strip of the webcomic ""Bunny"" also explored the idea in"
"An ass eating thistles Developed by authors during Renaissance times, the story of an ass eating thistles was a late addition to collections of Aesop's Fables. Beginning as a condemnation of miserly behaviour, it eventually was taken to demonstrate how preferences differ. Two Greek poems from the 2nd century CE seem to have contributed to the making of the modern fable. One is the four-line poem of Babrius about a fox who asks an ass how it can eat thorns with such a soft mouth, which is listed as 360 in the Perry Index. The other is a simile in"
"The Belly and the Members The Belly and the Members is one of Aesop's Fables and is numbered 130 in the Perry Index. It has been interpreted in varying political contexts over the centuries. There are several versions of the fable. In early Greek sources it concerns a dispute between the stomach and the feet, or between it and the hands and feet in later Latin versions. These grumble because the stomach gets all of the food, refusing to supply them with nourishment. They see sense when they realise that they are weakening themselves. In Mediaeval versions, the rest of"
"not saying something true, and so on. Chrysippus is known to have written several books on this paradox, although it is not known what solution he offered for it. Another paradox known as the ""Sorites"" or ""Heap"" asked ""How many grains of wheat do you need before you get a heap?"" It was said to challenge the idea of true or false by offering up the possibility of vagueness. The response of Chrysippus however was: ""That doesn't harm me, for like a skilled driver I shall restrain my horses before I reach the edge ... In like manner I restrain"
"Allais paradox The Allais paradox is a choice problem designed by to show an inconsistency of actual observed choices with the predictions of expected utility theory. The Allais paradox arises when comparing participants' choices in two different experiments, each of which consists of a choice between two gambles, A and B. The payoffs for each gamble in each experiment are as follows: Several studies involving hypothetical and small monetary payoffs, and recently involving health outcomes, have supported the assertion that when presented with a choice between 1A and 1B, most people would choose 1A. Likewise, when presented with a choice"
"which people attempt to attenuate through psychic numbing. The apparent conflict between caring about animals and embracing diets which require them to be harmed has been termed the ""meat paradox"". There is experimental evidence supporting the idea that the meat paradox induces cognitive dissonance in Westerners. Westerners are more willing to eat animals which they regard as having lesser mental capacities and moral standing, and conversely, to attribute lesser mental faculties and moral standing to animals which are eaten. Furthermore, the relationship is causative: the categorization of animals as food or not affects people's perception of their mental characteristics, and"
"an attempted justification for faith or intuitivity (called by Aristotle noetic or noesis). The argument is that, like the starving ass, we must make a choice to avoid being frozen in endless doubt. Other counter-arguments exist. According to Edward Lauzinger, Buridan's ass fails to incorporate the latent biases that humans always bring with them when making decisions. The situation of Buridan's ass was given a mathematical basis in a 1984 paper by American computer scientist Leslie Lamport, in which Lamport presents an argument that, given certain assumptions about continuity in a simple mathematical model of the Buridan's ass problem, there"
"Sorites paradox The sorites paradox (; sometimes known as the paradox of the heap) is a paradox that arises from vague predicates. A typical formulation involves a heap of sand, from which grains are individually removed. Under the assumption that removing a single grain does not turn a heap into a non-heap, the paradox is to consider what happens when the process is repeated enough times: is a single remaining grain still a heap? If not, when did it change from a heap to a non-heap? The word ""sorites"" derives from the Greek word for heap. The paradox is so"
"Mere addition paradox The mere addition paradox, also known as the repugnant conclusion, is a problem in ethics, identified by Derek Parfit and discussed in his book ""Reasons and Persons"" (1984). The paradox identifies the mutual incompatibility of four intuitively compelling assertions about the relative value of populations. Consider the four populations depicted in the following diagram: A, A+, B− and B. Each bar represents a distinct group of people, with the group's size represented by the bar's width and the happiness of each of the group's members represented by the bar's height. Unlike A and B, A+ and B−"
"to food. In other words, you may compete but you may not wage war"". All species inevitably follow this law, or as a consequence go extinct; the Takers, however, believe themselves to be exempt from this law and flout it at every point, which is therefore rapidly leading humanity towards extinction. To illustrate his philosophy, Ishmael proposes a revision to the Christian myth of the Fall of Man. Ishmael's version of why the fruit was forbidden to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is: eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil provides"
"Paradox of the plankton In aquatic biology, the paradox of the plankton describes the situation in which a limited range of resources supports an unexpectedly wide range of plankton species, apparently flouting the competitive exclusion principle which holds that when two species compete for the same resource, one will be driven to extinction. The paradox of the plankton results from the clash between the observed diversity of plankton and the competitive exclusion principle, also known as Gause's law, which states that, when two species compete for the same resource, ultimately only one will persist and the other will be driven"
"the witness to the theorem's validity. The paradox is ultimately based on the principle of formal logic that the statement formula_2 is true whenever A is false, i.e., any statement follows from a false statement (""ex falso quodlibet""). What is important to the paradox is that the conditional in classical (and intuitionistic) logic is the material conditional. It has the property that formula_2 is true if ""B"" is true or if ""A"" is false (in classical logic, but not intuitionistic logic, this is also a necessary condition). So as it was applied here, the statement ""if he is drinking, everyone"
"the fox gets his cookie. The fable is depicted no less than three times in the border of the Bayeux Tapestry and it has been speculated that a political commentary is intended. The picture is that of an ungainly bird sitting in a tree under which an animal is lying. They are looking at each other with their mouths open, and there is some object in the air between them. The reason for pointing to this particular fable is quite clear. Harold's vanity has led him to overreach himself and so lose everything. A later tapestry on which the story"