The American mathematician Rudy Rucker (1946) wrote a short story that serves as an example of vicious circle or loop thinking. In the story mentioned above, a couple – the Goodcheese – find a baby at the door of their house. The year is 1969 and the kind-hearted couple takes care of the baby who, over the years, becomes a remarkable scientist named Cynthia; an outstanding student who received her PhD from California Tech University.
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Over the years, Cynthia falls in love with another scientist, a clone biologist. They are a troubled couple; While he manages to reproduce a copy of Cynthia from one of his cells, she builds a time machine capable of transporting people back in time. Everything is going well, they are a perfect couple raising a baby, everything is going well until a new government bans human cloning and the decree leads to its final consequences because of the same government that promotes the killing of cloned humans. Faced with the threat, Cynthia and her husband decide to put the newly cloned woman in the time machine to save her life and have her return to 1969, where she will appear at the door of the Goodcheese couple’s home.
For Aristotle, the hen (act) precedes the egg (power). The Darwinian theory explains that the first vertebrates on earth, including birds, evolved from the egg.
This little story is an example of what is scientifically known as a closed causal loop; a loop of thought that takes us back to the old question that has come up so often since thought began: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Sarah Connor in The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984) has her son with a time traveler, the future leader of the anti-AI resistance.
One of the first to consider such a dilemma was Aristotle. For him, the chicken precedes the egg, since action precedes power. On the contrary, according to Darwinian theory, it was the egg first that evolved over time and gave birth to the first vertebrates on planet Earth, including birds.
Stephen Hawking also concluded that the egg came first, and then the chicken. However, Professor Antonio López Campillo (1925-2019) always affirmed that the correct answer was that both terms, egg and chicken, were given at the same time. To illustrate this theory, Professor Campillo, PhD in Physics from the Sorbonne, took us to quantum mechanics, where Richard Feynman pointed out that a positron – antielectron – is an electron that has gone back in time to come together with another electron to appear. Both the positron and the electron have appeared out of nowhere and approach each other and collide and destroy each other, disappearing in a flash of light. This causally closed cycle of matter/antimatter serves as an example to illustrate that cause and effect occur simultaneously in the dimension of elementary particles.
The causal loops that occur at the macroscopic level mirror those that occur at the atomic level. So, if we look at the behavior of the atomic world, chicken and egg occur simultaneously, as Antonio López Campillo pointed out after considering that identifying the first cause is not possible if effect and cause are confused, if origin and Cause to be confused Consequences are the same and a vicious circle is created.
Although for Plato the idea of the egg existed before the egg existed and the idea of the chicken existed before the chicken existed and for Aristotle it was the egg that warmed the chicken in the same way the body warms the blanket , for Professor Campillo, according to Feynman, both events – chicken and egg – occur simultaneously.
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