In Popular Culture
The liar paradox is occasionally used in fiction to shut down artificial intelligences, who are presented as being unable to process the sentence. In Star Trek: The Original Series episode I, Mudd, the Liar paradox is used by the characters of Captain Kirk and Harry Mudd to confuse and ultimately disable an android, and in the 1973 Doctor Who serial The Green Death, the Doctor temporarily stumps the insane Computer BOSS by asking it "If I were to tell you that the next thing I say would be true, but the last thing I said was a lie, would you believe me?" In the 2011 videogame Portal 2, GLaDOS attempts to use the "this sentence is false" paradox to defeat the naïve artificial intelligence Wheatley, but he responds saying "Um, true. I'll go with true. There, that was easy." and is unaffected.
Comedian George Carlin says "The following statement is true: the preceding statement is false!" within a list of announcements on his 1981 comedy album A Place For My Stuff.
In Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga, Cordelia Naismith frequently muses on the axiom "all Cretans are liars" in her inner monologue.
Read more about this topic: Liar Paradox
Famous quotes containing the words popular and/or culture:
“The poet will prevail to be popular in spite of his faults, and in spite of his beauties too. He will hit the nail on the head, and we shall not know the shape of his hammer. He makes us free of his hearth and heart, which is greater than to offer one the freedom of a city.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“Culture is the suggestion, from certain best thoughts, that a man has a range of affinities through which he can modulate the violence of any master-tones that have a droning preponderance in his scale, and succor him against himself. Culture redresses this imbalance, puts him among equals and superiors, revives the delicious sense of sympathy, and warns him of the dangers of solitude and repulsion.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)