Paradoxes and the Failures of Logic

Colin spends a great deal of time pondering paradoxes, such as "The Prisoner's Dilemma" and Lewis Carroll's take on "The Tortoise and The Hare." Colin does not like paradoxes because there is no clear-cut answer. As he says, "Inferences make me uncomfortable because I like certainty. The risk of faulty logic is the emergence of a paradox that might someday be resolved through better logic; the risk of making a faulty inference is that you're simply wrong" (Page 191). Yet Colin himself is the ultimate paradox: though he does not experience "normal" emotional reactions to prompts and he finds it an exercise of will to determine the emotional state of others, this makes him far more emotionally sensitive than a typical teenager. Because of his skills at simple observation of the physical world, he can infer an emotional state and respond to it appropriately...