Sunday, May 25, 2008

Solving the Chicken or Egg Causality Dilemma

(or: Why the egg came first)

For thousands of years, philosophers have pondered on the question "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" If one follows the idea of Fractal Pantheism answering this question is quite easy: The egg came first.

Why?

Fractal Pantheism assumes that life is a recursive process. Douglas Hofstäder described the key-property of life as a strange loop--a loop, however, with feedback, meaning: being of recursive nature. So there is not one egg that creates, but life itself is always some kind of egg (so to speak).

And the picture gets a lot clearer when we begin to assume that humans are also some kind of egg. If we further reframe our orginal question as "which came first, the human or the Internet?" We know that the human came first and created the Internet, indicating that the egg had to evolve as organism in order to create the chicken. Many people, however, seem to believe that human inventions are not part of nature, but I disagree, simply for the reason that human beings are as alien to biological cells and DNA as the Internet or any other human invention is to us.