Truth HQ by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

T R U T H H Q

4. Spontaneously Materialising

Rhinoceroses and Vicious Unicorns

An unfortunate encounter with a rhino leads to a future of interstellar war – or so it seems…

How did it ever come to this? How is it that we – by which I mean humanity – find ourselves at war with aliens? Interstellar war! And all of our own making. It started, as these things often do, with some really trivial things. It started first with a philosophical puzzle.

And this was the puzzle. How can you prove that a rhinoceros will not spontaneously appear in your room? The puzzle is attributed to

Ludwig Wittgenstein when he was a philosophy undergraduate student in England. He asked the question of his philosophy professor, and apparently felt that his professor could not adequately answer it.

Now it may seem like a rather trivial and silly puzzle – and it is, in and of itself. But it tipped into something that would eventually become a major obsession of humanity and lead to the interstellar conflict that we now face. How did this happen? To answer that we have to go a little into the types of truth that are defined by philosophers.

28