Elementary cellular automata and self-referential paradoxes

摘要

We associate an elementary cellular automaton with a set of self-referential sentences, whose revision process is exactly the evolution process of that automaton. A simple but useful result of this connection is that a set of self-referential sentences is paradoxical, iff (the evolution process for) the cellular automaton in question has no fixed points. We sort out several distinct kinds of paradoxes by the existence and features of the fixed points of their corresponding automata. They are finite homogeneous paradoxes and infinite homogeneous paradoxes. In some weaker sense, we will also introduce no-no-sort paradoxes and virtual paradoxes. The introduction of these paradoxes, in turn, leads to a new classification of the cellular automata.