Bilkent University Department of Electical Engineering,
IEEE Bilkent Student branch and
Bilkent ACM SIGART (Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence)

present a series of seminars Philosophical Puzzles for Everyone...

The sixth talk is

Abstract: It would seem that an object cannot be both red and green all over at the same time. Many philosophers have argued that it is a necessary, and not merely accidental, truth that a surface cannot be colored with more than one color at the same time. This is known as "color incompatibility." A more interesting question--which is not asked very often, if at all--is whether an object can have more than one length (or volume, or mass, etc.) at the same time. I reject the color incompatibility claim: it is conceivable that an object have more than one color all over simultaneously. The analogous problem about lengths, however, is a more puzzling one. It leads us to the question of whether it is possible to have a consistent geometry which assigns more than one shortest distance between a pair of distinct points.