[DemolitionRed]

Originally Posted by Toy Soldier

I'm talking about the OP in regards to wishes/hopes/prayers coming to pass (being successful) as a result of wishing/hoping/praying without fear that they will. That's what's a placebo. Doing so doesn't actually have any impact at all, in abstract terms, on the likelihood of what you want to happen actually happening: what it MIGHT do is increase the likelihood of you taking positive action to achieve those goals by increasing confidence.

What you're talking about is purely the internal part, actively using logic to remove fear, with the removal of fear being the goal in itself, which is something slightly different.

However, I still am not seeing where paradox comes into it. I don't see a paradox and, moreover, if there WAS a logical paradox then by definition the problem would be unsolvable? I don't know if there's something I'm not getting or if maybe OP just used the wrong word? You can't combat or solve anything with a paradox. Surely. If you hit a paradox then you start over because your logic is flawed... You can't "close the loop", so to speak, or in programming terms, it would "crash your computer".

I don't agree that you can't solve anything with paradoxical intervention.

We avoid what we fear but if we purposely bring about what we fear then its paradoxical or at least it could be. An example of this is stammering. A person who stammers fears talking to new people or to an audience. That person spends all his/her time worrying about it which of course makes the stammer worse. Logical attempts to stop the stammer could be speech therapy but if speech therapy fails to give a result, what then? paradoxical thinking may be about finding an odd alternative and acting on that alternative, no matter how bizarre. If they can do that, they may just find a paradoxical solution.