prokopetz:

avienbgwp: prokopetz: Honestly, I’ve always taken the chicken-or-egg question not as an ontological paradox, but as an illustration of the perils of failing to adequately define your terms. Setting aside the trivial solution of “well, the question didn’t specify that it had to be a chicken egg” (we may safely presume from context that a chicken egg is intended), the central question becomes: are we defining a chicken egg as an egg laid by a chicken, or as an egg that hatches into a chicken?

it doesn’t matter becasuse the way evolution works, it is impossible to say that there was a single organism that was definitively not a chicken that laid an egg that hatched into an organism which was definitively a chicken. So in other words, which came first? Impossible to say, but not for the reason you’d think. Sure it matters. If we define a chicken egg as an egg laid by a chicken, then clearly the chicken came first, because you can’t have an egg that was laid by a chicken without first having a chicken to lay it. Your objection is relevant only if we define a chicken egg as an egg that hatches into a chicken. The question of where an egg’s “chickenness” ultimately arises from remains.



Ok, but given how obvious that solution is, I’ve never taken the thought experiment to be asking if there were chickens before there were eggs laid by chickens. That’s a non-issue.

Now that I think about it though, defining it eaither way directly gives you the answer, doesn’t it?

Which came first, the chicken or the egg a chicken hatches from?

or

Which came first? The chicken, or the egg laid by a chicken?

I had a similar take on “If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”. My answer was and sill is “Yes. Sound waves exist without things to interpret them as “the sound of a tree falling”. My father said no, becasue “sound is sound waves that have been processed by ears”.

So the real question becomes “define sound”.