Why did the Chicken Cross the Road?

‘To get to the other side’ is a bit too simplistic. So, to remedy that, here are a number of interesting and more original replies to this famous – and surprisingly old – anti-humour riddle joke:

‘There are ‘quips and quillets’ which seem actual conundrums, but yet are none. Of such is this: ‘Why does a chicken cross the street?’ – The Knickerbocker, or The New York Monthly, March 1847, p. 283

Douglas Adams: 42.

Aristotle: To actualize its potential. It is the nature of chickens to cross roads.

Buddha: If you ask this question, you deny your own chicken-nature.

Julius Caesar: To come, to see, to conquer.

Howard Cosell: It may very well have been one of the most astonishing events to grace the annals of history. An historic, unprecedented avian biped with the temerity to attempt such an Herculean achievement formerly relegated to Homo sapien pedestrians is truly a remarkable occurrence.

Salvador Dali: A melting fish.

Charles Darwin: It was the logical next step after coming down from the trees. After all, chickens, over great periods of time, have been naturally selected in such a way that they are now genetically disposed to cross roads.

Jacques Derrida: What is the difference? The chicken was merely deferring from one side of the road to other. And how do we get the idea of the chicken in the first place? Does it exist outside of language? Also, any number of contending discourses may be discovered within the act of the chicken crossing the road, and each interpretation is equally valid as the authorial intent can never be discerned, because structuralism is dead.

Rene Descartes: It had sufficient reason to believe it was dreaming anyway.

Bob Dylan: How many roads must one chicken cross?

Albert Einstein: Whether the chicken crossed the road or the road crossed the chicken depends upon your frame of reference.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: It didn’t cross the road; it transcended it.

Epicurus: For pleasure.

Michel Foucault: It did so because the discourse of crossing the road left it no choice – the police state was oppressing it.

Sigmund Freud: The chicken was obviously female and obviously interpreted the pole on which the crosswalk sign was mounted as a phallic symbol of which she was envious, selbstverständlich. However, the fact that you are at all concerned about why the chicken crossed the road reveals your underlying sexual insecurity.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: The eternal hen-principle made it do it.

Stephen Jay Gould: It is possible that there is a sociobiological explanation for it, but we have been deluged in recent years with sociobiological stories despite the fact that we have little direct evidence about the genetics of behaviour, and we do not know how to obtain it for the specific behaviours that figure most prominently in sociobiological speculation.

Ernest Hemingway: To die. In the rain.

Heraclitus: A chicken cannot cross the same road twice.

Adolf Hitler: It needed Lebensraum.

David Hume: Out of custom and habit.

Doug Hofstadter: To seek explication of the correspondence between appearance and essence through the mapping of the external road-object onto the internal road-concept.

James Joyce: To forge in the smithy of its soul the uncreated conscience of its race.

Carl Jung: The confluence of events in the cultural gestalt necessitated that individual chickens cross roads at this historical juncture, and therefore synchronicitously brought such occurrences into being.

Immanuel Kant: Because it would have this be a universal law.

Martin Luther King: It had a dream.

Gottfried von Leibniz: In this best possible world, the road was made for it to cross.

Machiavelli: So that its subjects will view it with admiration, as a chicken which has the daring and courage to boldly cross the road, but also with fear, for whom among them has the strength to contend with such a paragon of avian virtue? In such a manner is the princely chicken’s dominion maintained. In any case, the end of crossing the road justifies whatever motive there was.

Karl Marx: To escape the bourgeois middle-class struggle. It was a historical inevitability.

Sir Isaac Newton: Chickens at rest tend to stay at rest. Chickens in motion tend to cross the road.

Moses: And the LORD spake unto the chicken, “Thou shalt cross the road.” And the chicken crossed the road.

Pyrrho the Skeptic: What road?

Jean-Paul Sartre: In order to act in good faith and be true to itself, the chicken found it necessary to cross the road.

B.F. Skinner: Because the external influences which had pervaded its sensorium from birth had caused it to develop in such a fashion that it would tend to cross roads, even while believing these actions to be of its own free will.

J.R.R. Tolkien: The chicken, sunlight coruscating off its radiant yellow- white coat of feathers, approached the dark, sullen asphalt road and scrutinized it intently with its obsidian-black eyes. Every detail of the thoroughfare leapt into blinding focus: the rough texture of the surface, over which countless tires had worked their relentless tread through the ages; the innumerable fragments of stone embedded within the lugubrious mass, perhaps quarried from the great pits where the Sons of Man laboured not far from here; the dull black asphalt itself, exuding those waves of heat which distort the sight and bring weakness to the body; the other attributes of the great highway too numerous to give name. And then it crossed it.

Mark Twain: The news of its crossing has been greatly exaggerated.

Kurt Vonnegut: There is no “why”, there only “is”. So it goes.

Ludwig Wittgenstein: The possibility of “crossing” was encoded into the objects “chicken” and “road”, and circumstances came into being which caused the actualization of this potential occurrence.

Zeno of Elea: To prove it could never reach the other side.

Beauty

When contemplating the property beauty, as with knowledge, it turns out to be very difficult to provide an uncontentious analysis. Because of its many different conceptions and dimensions, the full value of beauty is surprisingly hard to capture. To that end, below is a list of quotations to help sketch a definition of the property beauty.

“Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.”
– Confucius

“The voice of beauty speaks softly; it creeps only into the most fully awakened souls.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche

“Beauty awakens the soul to act.”
– Dante Alighieri

“Beauty is not caused. It is.”
– Emily Dickinson

“Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.
But you are eternity and you are the mirror.”
– Khalil Gibran

“Whatever the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth whether it existed before or not.”
– John Keats

“There is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in the proportion.”
– Edgar Allan Poe

“Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.”
– David Hume

“Beauty is a form of Genius – is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in the dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it.”
– Oscar Wilde

“Beauty, to me, is about being comfortable in your own skin. That, or a kick-ass red lipstick.”
– Gwyneth Paltrow

“Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.”
– Anne Frank

See more: Approximations

What If Christianity Had Defeated Reason?

What if the Christian organised religion had successfully blocked all scientific progress and philosophical development of reason for the past 2000 years?

• We would probably still think the earth was located at the centre of the solar system (this school of thought is known as geocentrism, as opposed to heliocentrism), despite what brilliant astronomers like Copernicus and Galileo have argued.
• We would still think that the sun revolved around the earth. (Having said that, in 2012, 18% of Americans still believed the sun revolves around the earth.)
• Mankind would probably not have tolerated any kind of modern democracy, since theocratic politics do not tolerate opposing views, let alone critical or secular ones. After all, there is a strong argument to be made that organised religion does not tolerate dissent.
• Secularists, radical and experimental scientists, thinkers and philosophers – dissenters of any kind for that matter – would still be silenced. That is, regularly burned at the stake.
• Homosexuals, bisexuals and people with multiple casual sexual partners would probably be in the same amount of danger as people of a similar nature are nowadays in central Africa – perhaps even more danger.
• Women would still be banned from most of public life; in the same way history has shown us for the past centuries.
• We would still think human beings are a special divinely created exception in biology. Facts about evolution and genetics would be unknown.
• And since mankind would be considered to be above nature, animals would probably be exploited even more than today.
• Since evidence based sciences would have a tough time, evidence based medicine would probably not exist in the form we know today, we would still use quacks, faith healers and prayer to combat diseases instead of vaccinations and other medications.
• Nations that would identify themselves as devoutly Christian would probably still be fighting religious wars against the other faithful.
• Many of the works of noteworthy intellectual figures would never have been published (perhaps because they were placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum or similar black list). Notable thinkers on this list include: Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Victor Hugo, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, André Gide, Emanuel Swedenborg, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, René Descartes, Francis Bacon, Thomas Browne, John Milton, John Locke, Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Blaise Pascal and Hugo Grotius. (Interestingly, Charles Darwin’s works were never included.)

‘Yes. To you, Baldrick, the Renaissance was just something that happened to other people, wasn’t it? […] No that’s what I think, that’s what I think, what do you think? Try to have a thought of your own, Baldrick. Thinking is so important. What do you think?’

– Joseph M. 1998. Blackadder The Whole Damn Dynasty London, Great Britain: Penguin Books (1999) p. 137-138

How to Derive an Ought from an Is

The 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume famously argued that no description of the way the world is (facts) can tell us how the world ought to be (values). Hume’€™s argument was actually directed against religious apologists who sought to deduce morality from the existence of God.

Ironically, however, Hume’s reasoning has since become one of the primary causes why some people – mainly of religious persuasion – fail to link morality to human knowledge. In fact, Hume may well have been wrong in his reasoning, since there is strong logical evidence to suggest one can indeed derive an ought from an is.

Alexander Stoddart’s statue of David Hume dressed as a classical thinker

Axiom 1: There are behaviours, intentions, cultural practices, etc. which potentially lead to the worst possible misery for everyone. There are also behaviours, intentions, cultural practices, etc. which do not, and which, in fact, lead to states of well-being for many sentient creatures, to the degree that well-being is possible in this universe.

Axiom 2: While it may often be difficult in practice, distinguishing between these two sets is possible in principle.

Axiom 3: Our values are ways of thinking about this domain of possibilities. If we value liberty, privacy, benevolence, dignity, freedom of expression, honesty, good manners, the right to own property, etc.—we value these things only in so far as we judge them to be part of the second set of factors conducive to (someone else’s) well-being.

Axiom 4: Values, therefore, are (explicit or implicit) judgements about how the universe works and are themselves facts about our universe (i.e. states of the human brain).

Axiom 5: It is possible to be confused or mistaken about how the universe works. It is, therefore, possible to have the wrong values (i.e. values which lead toward, rather than away from, the worst possible misery for everyone).

Axiom 6: Given that the well-being of humans and animals must depend on states of the world and on states of their brains, and science represents our most systematic means of understanding these states, science can potentially help us avoid the worst possible misery for everyone.

On A Virgin Birth

“Which is more likely, that the whole natural order is suspended or that a Jewish minx should tell a lie?”

– David Hume

On David Hume and Miracles

“He says if something appears to have happened that is not consistent with the laws of nature (the laws of nature have been suspended), there are two contingencies: either that the laws of nature have been suspended (in your favour) or that you’re under a misapprehension. Which is the likeliest?

It’s always likeliest that you’re always under a misapprehension. And if you’re hearing about this from someone who claims to have seen it, and you were getting it second hand, the odds that it’s a misapprehension that’s being spread are exponential increased. So if I heard voices telling me to do something and that this was on behalf of a deity, I would check myself in.”

– Christopher Hitchens

Turtles All The Way Down

A jocular expression of the infinite regress problem in cosmology posed by the unmoved mover paradox – a philosophical concept described by Aristotle as a primary cause or mover of all the motion in the universe. As is implicit in the name, the unmoved mover is not moved by any prior action. Aristotle argues, in Book 8 of the Physics Book 12 of the Metaphysics: “there must be an immortal, unchanging being, ultimately responsible for all wholeness and orderliness in the sensible world.”

“Turtles all the way down” is a phrase that was popularized by Stephen Hawking in 1988. The turtle metaphor in the anecdote represents a popular notion of a so-called primitive cosmological myth, the flat earth supported on the back of a World Turtle. A person who believes the Earth rests on a giant turtle can thereby also deny the existence of the universe.

A Florida Box Turtle or Terrapene Carolina Bauri

A comparable metaphor describing the circular cause and consequence for the same problem is the chicken and egg problem – which came first? Another metaphor addressing the problem of this infinite regression (as the turtles would imply), albeit not in a cosmological context, is Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? – a phrase coined by the Roman poet Juvenus which is often translated as “Who watches the watchmen?” The same problem in epistemology is known as the Münchhausen Trilemma.

The Trilemma was named after Baron Münchhausen, who allegedly pulled himself (and the horse he was sitting on) out of a swamp by his own hair. This Trilemma is a philosophical term coined to stress the purported impossibility to prove any truth even in the fields of logic and mathematics. If we ask of any knowledge: “How do I know that it’s true?”, we may provide proof; yet that same question can be asked of the proof, and any subsequent proof. The Münchhausen Trilemma is that we have only three options when providing proof in this situation:

• The circular argument, in which theory and proof support each other (i.e. we repeat ourselves at some point) “Only an untrustworthy person would run for office. The fact that politicians are untrustworthy is proof of this.”
• The regressive argument, in which each proof requires a further proof ad infinitum (i.e. we just keep giving proofs, presumably forever) “A is proven by B, which is proven C, which proven by D etcetera ad infinitum.”
• The axiomatic argument, which rests on accepted precepts (i.e. we reach some bedrock assumption or certainty) “A. Baron Münchhausen exists, B. Baron Münchhausen has got hairs on his head etcetera.”

The first two methods of reasoning are fundamentally weak, and because the Greek sceptics advocated deep questioning of all accepted values and refused to accept (unconditional axiomatic) proofs of the third sort. The trilemma, then, is the decision among these three equally unsatisfying options.

Back to turtles. The most widely known version of the Turtles All The Way Down story appears in Stephen Hawking’s 1988 book A Brief History of Time, which starts:

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”

Hawking’s suggested connection to Russell may be due to Russell’s 1927 lecture Why I Am Not a Christian. In it, while discounting the First Cause argument intended to be a proof of God’s existence, Russell comments (with an argument not relevant to modern Hindu beliefs):

If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu’s view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, “How about the tortoise?” the Indian said, “Suppose we change the subject.”

There is an allusion to the story in David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (published in 1779):

How can we satisfy ourselves without going on in infinitum? And, after all, what satisfaction is there in that infinite progression? Let us remember the story of the Indian philosopher and his elephant. It was never more applicable than to the present subject. If the material world rests upon a similar ideal world, this ideal world must rest upon some other; and so on, without end. It were better, therefore, never to look beyond the present material world.

Philosophical allusion to the story goes back at least as far as John Locke. In his 1690 tract An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke compares one who would say that properties inhere in “substance” to the Indian who said the world was on an elephant which was on a tortoise “but being again pressed to know what gave support to the broad-backed tortoise, replied — something, he knew not what.”

The fact is the world does not rest on elephants, turtles or any other animal for that matter. However, the reasoning and philosophical attempts to prove a possibility of there being a giant tortoise on which the earth can rest are fascinating. Just as fascinating as the cultures out of which these beliefs have emerged.

To quote comedian Rich Hall: “This is why America has a space program.”

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