Recursion & Time Machine

Understanding Recursion with Factorial and an English Ruler Drawing. | by Adesiji Blessing | Analytics Vidhya | Medium

Writing a recursive function requires a special kind of thinking, you have to write the function assuming that it already exists and you have to some how use it in the current function that you are writing. By the time you figure out how to call the other function, the problem would have been solved for you.

It is like trying to build a time machine, then realizing that, once you build it, you could travel back in time and give it to your younger self so that you didn't have to build it in the first place. But you still have the problem of how to start this whole process in a way that your future self has the possibility of completing the time machine and travel back.

After writing this post, I noticed that there is a name for this phenomenon. It's called the "Bootstrap paradox".

Comments

My Quote - 1

The notion that, 'What we perceive is the actual reality', is not only improbable but completely unnecessary from the evolutionary standpoint

The hard problem

There are two orthogonal, equally valid and equally unverifiable axioms about the foundation of reality that existed for a long time in our society. One is from the west, which is the scientific worldview. It claims that the world is made of matter. This matter came out of nothing, from matter came the life form, the simple organisms first and then the complex one. The complex organisms later developed a central nerves-system, from this emerged the mind and the consciousness. This consciousness, that ultimately emerged from the mater, enables the organism to perceive the material world back. The other theory is from the east, which is the spiritual world view. It claims that the consciousness is the fundamental aspect of reality from which the mind, thought and the objective world emerges. The former aims to unlock the mystery of reality by dissecting the matter. The later does so by introspecting the consciousness.

Reality Check

Most people assume that the world we perceive is the world that exists. It is fundamentally a flawed assumption. If you just probe this assumption a bit deeper, you will easily arrive at the conclusion that the world that we perceive is the world that we create. I am not saying that the reality does not exist or that we create the world through our imagination. What I am claiming is that the perception is not a passive act. Image, sound, time and space does not exist outside our perception. There may be something "out there" (if at all) that correlates to what we perceive . But, in order to perceive a specific form of reality, we have to create them in the first place. Don't forget that the unique point of view of one's individual reality does not exist without him. Every moment of perception is an act of creation through the subconscious process of our neurological network, that evolved over millions of years of trial and error. Let us examine in scientifi...

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