Chicken and Egg

I might have said this before but I will say it now in a soundbite.

One of my greatest ambitions is to solve the problem of artificial intelligence - how we can build a machine that has a human like intelligence, who can invent concepts and make use of them - you know, think.

I'm on the wrong side of 30 now so I'm probably running out of time. But one of the key questions that I will face is this: what gives a concept meaning? Is there something that has meaning of its own, which is so great that it and it alone gives meaning to everything else? Or is everything circular, as in you have this fantastic big web of concepts and meanings, and everything is pointing to something else?

It's very useful that I've studied maths before. Because maths is nothing other than a system of concepts and meanings, and it is very clear - more clear than other systems of meanings, like law, or ideas in politics - how all these ideas are related to each other. So what we have in maths is that we have a few anchors, we call them axioms, where the ground rules are being laid out and they don't need any evidence to support them. Then everything else is built on top of those axioms.

But what gives those axioms validity? I think what gives it validity is how many ideas you can build upon those foundations and the whole system does not screw up. There have been times before when the system looked very shaky, and a lot of wild conclusions that seem to have been derived from those precepts. But I think for the most part the structure is safe. So I think what validates the axioms is that they give rise to something sensible, they don't lead to contradictions.

Yet another way to put this is that the axioms themselves derive their validity from the theorems that these axioms give rise to. In a way the axioms and the theorems validate each other, so in a way, logic is still circular.

Or let's have a more concrete example since I think I might be boring my readers with my high minded conceptual shit. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Or let's have a simpler example, how are the meanings of a chicken and an egg derived? In other words, which came first? The idea of the chicken or the idea of the egg?

We could say a lot of things about the chicken but ultimately one of the crucial things we will say is that it is the thing that hatches out of the egg. The egg is the thing that hatches out of the chicken. They give meaning to each other. You can't define a chicken without the egg, or vice verca. But that's OK, because that's the way that they evolved. On its way from evolving from a bacteria to a chicken, it stopped being a unicellular object, and you needed a mechanism to protect the embryo during that very vulnerable period in the chicken's life cycle. There just happened to be a layer of calcium, and it just so happened that the packaging and unique enough to fool the human mind into thinking that these are 2 separate entities, which of course they're not.

Neither the chicken nor the egg came first - you see the reason why this question is so tricky is because the way that it was worded is already philosophically loaded - you're assuming that the chicken and the egg are separate entities and that's not really the right way to look at it. If you remember that they are part of the whole system which is the life cycle of the chicken species then it doesn't make sense to consider them separately. Neither came first, of course.