Author: Kevin Dickinson / Source: Big Think
- It’s one of the oldest—and easiest to picture—philosophical conundrums of our time.
- It can be best answered by combining two of the most popular takes on it.
- Even so — there’s a reason the question has been asked for at least 2,000 years.
Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
It’s the kind of question children ask each other on the playground in a bid to blow minds. Others include “Could your color red be my color blue?” and “How do I know the world exists outside my mind?” and “What is the meaning of life and all that stuff?”Turns out, children are natural philosophers, comfortably tackling the problems doctorate-brandishing philosophers have been debating for centuries — albeit without the highfalutin language. Can we describe qualia to others? Can we epistemologically attest for consciousness outside our own minds? Is there a telos the universe?
Each of these questions deserves exploration, but as the headline suggests, today we’ll be exploring the enduring predicament of chickens and eggs. Here’s your guide to finally understanding the chicken-and-egg problem.
The problem in an eggshell
Flickr, Creative Commons
All chickens hatch from eggs, and all eggs are laid by chickens. This fact is nothing special; everything depends on a preexisting something for its existence. Schoolyard bewilderment sets in when our imaginations trace this line of thought back as far as possible.
Where did the first chicken come from? It came from an egg. Okay, where did that egg come from?
It came from a chicken. Fair enough, but where did that chicken come from? An egg. And that egg? A chicken. And on and on, until we get bored and decide to swing on the monkey bars.This is called infinite regression: the initial link in the causal chain (chickens come from eggs) is supported by the truth of a second link (eggs come from chickens), but that proposition can only be true if the first one is beforehand. It’s the logical equivalent of standing between two mirrors so that infinite yous extend on forever.
Infinite regression inevitably leads to a dilemma. Everyday experience tells us that no effect can occur without an initial cause. But the chicken-and-egg problem makes it impossible to tell cause from effect. Each relies on the other, but it is logically unsatisfactory to say history is an endless cycle of chickens and eggs.
So which one was first?
The philosopher’s chicken
Creative commons: John Towner.
Plutarch was the first person to describe the chicken-and-egg problem, writing in his Symposiacs: “Soon after [Alexander] proposed that perplexed question, that plague of the inquisitive, Which was first, the bird or the egg?” The gathered symposiasts then debate the matter, but the discussion quickly moves beyond metaphorical chickens and eggs to tackle the “great and weighty problem” of “whether the world had a beginning.”1
While Plutarch gave the problem its favored form, the tradition of questioning first causes goes back to at least the Ancient Greeks. The Greeks realized that the world, the universe, and everything must have had a beginning, but what caused it to come into being? And even if you solve that, what caused that cause to come into being?
Aristotle answered this causal quandary with the “unmoved mover” — an eternal, motionless substance or energy that can neither come into nor go out of existence yet started the causal chain that led to the universe.
Framing Aristotle’s concept in the language of the chicken-and-egg problem, let’s call this unmoved hen Chicken Prime. Far more than Optimus’s cowardly sibling, Chicken Prime is the initial chicken that began the causal chain of all chickens and eggs to come….
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