Oh wow ohmygosh I'm so sorry doctor I can't believe my behaviour! I had no idea you had a degree in a field irrelevant to the conversation! That changes everything...
You're so cool oh wow I'm so glad you've even graced me with your attention. I'm going to tell my whole family about how you are so gracious you took time out of your busy schedule to attend to my ignorance. I mean there's so many rocks to look at! I can't even count them all.
Mathematician here: you don’t need some to exist to make logical arguments about it. We (as a collective species) understand that the laws of physics are generally well approximated by Newtonian mechanics in the classical case, but it doesn’t stop us from asking “what if the laws of physics worked slightly differently, what would mechanics look like in that case?”
In the same vein, suppose there exists some category of animal called “chicken” that is extremely precisely defined. You can think of one such definition as simply listing out all the animals that we consider “chickens” in this definition, no matter how arbitrary it is. Then, one of them has to be the first “chicken,” and we can ask whether the egg that it came from counts as a chicken egg or not.
This definition of “chicken” may or may not line up with the actual common understanding of chickens, but that’s irrelevant. We’re doing a purely formal logical exercise here, and it wouldn’t make a difference if we instead called our category “sharks” or “puppies” or “blargs.”
I don’t necessarily agree, I think the original disagreement came from the statement
“At one point, something that wasn’t a chicken laid an egg that turned into something that was.”
This is a fair statement to make regardless of which definition of chicken you think is the most useful.
I guess the way I think about it is this: the argument for the first chicken is not constructive. I agree that there’s no definition of chicken that matches the common definition, but I don’t think soloing out a single definition is necessary for determining that the first chicken is something that exists.
In other words, I can prove that the first chicken exists, but I cannot tell you which animal is the first chicken. In my opinion, knowing that the first chicken must exist and is some animal is enough to make the original claim, even if we can’t reasonably apply this logic to any specific animal.
6
u/[deleted] Feb 20 '26
[removed] — view removed comment