Chicken or Egg? Neither Came First

A philosophical fable through multiverse theory, non-dual physics, and the oldest argument in existence. A wormhole through quantum branching, the arrow of time, and what it means to become.

It starts, as so many wormholes do, with a question so old it has basically become a meme.

Which came first — the chicken or the egg?

We’ve all heard this one. At dinner tables, in philosophy seminars, in the mouths of children who have somehow, without trying at all, stumbled onto one of the deepest paradoxes in all of causality. Chicken or egg?

You’ve probably laughed it off. Probably gave an answer too — evolutionary biology, the egg, obviously — and moved on with your life like a normal person.

But I want to stay here for a second. Because the question is not actually about chickens or eggs. It never was. It’s about the nature of beginnings. About whether causality has a floor. About what we even mean when we say something came first in a universe where time itself might just be… a construct. And when you follow it all the way down, it stops being funny pretty quickly.

The Problem With Asking “Which Came First”

The question assumes a line.

It assumes that time is like a linear corridor — long, straight, with a definite start. And that somewhere along that corridor is a door labelled chicken and a door labelled egg that show up in a particular order. Cause, then effect. The great chain of being, stretching backward to something that was not caused.

This is the cosmological assumption baked into the question. And it’s the assumption we need to blow up, because modern physics does not describe time as a corridor. It describes time as a dimension. A coordinate axis, like length or width, through which objects move, but which has no inherent direction at the level of fundamental physical law.

Here’s the precise version of that: almost all the fundamental equations of physics are time-symmetric. Newton’s laws of motion work identically forward and backward. Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism hold equally well in both temporal directions. The Schrödinger equation, which governs quantum mechanical evolution, is fully reversible. If you filmed a billiard ball collision and played it backward, nothing in the laws of physics would tell you which direction was the real one.

T-symmetry: the physical laws governing a closed system are identical whether time runs forward or backward. The asymmetry we experience — the felt sense of past before future, cause before effect — is actually thermodynamic phenomenon called entropy, not a fundamental one.

The arrow of time, the sense that yesterday precedes tomorrow, arises from entropy: the statistical tendency of closed systems to move from ordered to disordered states. Entropy increases because there are simply far more disordered configurations of matter than ordered ones. You can scramble an egg but not unscramble it. Not because physics forbids it, but because the probability of all those molecules spontaneously reassembling is so vanishingly small it might as well be zero.

So the arrow of time is statistical. Not fundamental.

Which means the question which came first is not asking about physics. It’s asking about our perspective from within a thermodynamic river we cannot step out of.

The chicken and the egg did not compete for priority in some objective temporal order. They both simply are, spread across a four-dimensional spacetime block in which all moments coexist. And we, moving through that block in one direction only, experience them as a sequence.

But what if they didn’t need to move in one direction only? Well lets go on a exploration.

Chapter 1 : The Big Galactic Journey Across Time and Space

Imagine that the chicken and the egg knew this.

Imagine they understood time not as a corridor but as a territory, something that could be navigated instead of merely endured. And so they did what any rational being would do when handed an infinite territory and no constraints: they explored it. All of it.

Every reality. Every configuration of matter and law and initial condition. Every branch of every decision the universe had ever not-quite-made. They took what physicists call the path integral — Richard Feynman’s formulation of quantum mechanics, which says that a particle moving from point A to point B does not travel one path. It travels all paths simultaneously, and the classical trajectory we observe is the one where all those paths constructively interfere.

Feynman’s path integral: the probability amplitude for a particle to travel from x₁ to x₂ is the sum over all possible paths connecting them, each weighted by e^(iS/ℏ) where S is the action of that path. Every path is real. What we see is their superposition.

The chicken and the egg did not choose a path. They summed over all of them.

And at the end of all paths — after every reality, every cosmology, every version of the universe that ever was or could be — they arrived at the most ideal configuration. The one where the causal code of their paradox could finally be cracked.

The one where they could go back.

Chapter 2 : Two Universes, Both Wrong

So they went back. And this is where it gets interesting.

In one universe, the egg came first. A mutation in the genetic material of a proto-chicken, carried in an egg laid by something that was almost-but-not-quite a chicken, produced the first true chicken. Biologically speaking, this is the actual answer — and any geneticist will tell you so without hesitation.

In the other universe, the chicken came first. By whatever mechanism — divine creation, spontaneous emergence, the intervention of some more fundamental causal layer — the chicken preceded and produced the egg.

Both universes resolved the question. Both universes had a winner.

But in both universes, the future was zero.

This is the part that needs careful attention — and honestly, it’s the part that broke my brain a little when I first sat with it. Winning a paradox does not dissolve it. Answering which came first does not change the underlying problem, which was never about chickens or eggs to begin with. The question was about self-referential causality — the loop, the circle, the system that seems to contain its own origin. And picking one end of the loop does not unloop it. It just renames the problem.

Mathematically, this is the structure of a fixed-point equation. You’re looking for x such that f(x) = x — a value that maps to itself under the function. In a causal loop, the chicken is a function of the egg and the egg is a function of the chicken, and any attempt to break the symmetry by choosing a first element just shifts where the fixed point is, not whether it exists.

Fixed point theorem (Brouwer, 1910): every continuous function from a compact convex set to itself has at least one fixed point. The chicken-egg system is a fixed point. You cannot remove it. You can only decide which side you are looking at it from.

Both universes, their futures exhausted, had arrived at the same zero. And therefor, the question still remained. The loop still remained.

So they met again.

Chapter 3 : The Wheel of Time

This time it was different. Here’s what they understood, standing at zero, in the space between two resolved and useless universes:

Time is not real.

And okay, before you close the tab, this is not mysticism or woo-woo quotation. This is increasingly serious physics.

Julian Barbour, in The End of Time, argues that what we call time is not a fundamental feature of reality but an emergent illusion arising from the relative configurations of matter. There is no flowing now. There is only a vast static landscape of configurations , what he calls Platonia, and consciousness creates the experience of movement through it.

Carlo Rovelli, in The Order of Time, arrives at the same conclusion from a different angle: at the fundamental level of quantum gravity, the equations of physics contain no time variable. Time appears only when you zoom out to the level of thermodynamic approximation. At the deepest level of reality we can currently describe, there is no before and after. There is only what is, in every configuration, all at once.

“The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events. The difference between things and events is that things persist in time; events have a limited duration. We can say that things are made of matter; events are made of light.” — Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time

If time is not real, if it’s an emergent approximation rather than a fundamental substrate, then which came first is not even a question about physics. It’s a question about the story we’re telling about physics.

So the chicken and the egg, knowing this, decided to take their time this time.

They entered the wheel. Not the linear corridor of before-and-after, but the wheel — the cyclical structure that every tradition that has looked clearly at time has eventually arrived at.

The Hindu kalachakra, the Buddhist wheel of dependent origination, the Stoic eternal recurrence, the physicist’s block universe: all different languages for the same underlying structure. Time as territory, not trajectory.

And in the wheel, with no urgency and no direction, they did something the original question had never permitted them to do.

They upskilled.

Chapter 4 : What It Means to Become Both and Neither

In quantum mechanics, a particle does not have a definite state until it is measured. Before measurement, it exists in a superposition — a linear combination of all possible states, each with an associated probability amplitude.

The superposition is not ignorance. It’s not a placeholder for a hidden true state we haven’t found yet. Bell’s theorem — confirmed experimentally with the precision required to win a Nobel Prize in 2022 — rules out hidden variable theories with near-certainty.

The particle is genuinely in all states at once. Measurement does not reveal the state. It creates it.

Bell’s inequality: if hidden local variables determined quantum outcomes, the correlations between measurements on entangled particles would satisfy a specific mathematical bound. Experiments consistently violate this bound. The superposition is real.

Now consider what this means for the chicken and the egg.

Each, in isolation, is a classical object — a definite thing with a definite identity. The question which came first treats them as classical objects competing for a position on a timeline. One wins. One loses. The answer is a single, definite outcome.

But the chicken and the egg, having traversed every possible universe, having seen every resolution and found each one insufficient, had become something different. They had become what physicists call an entangled system — two particles whose states cannot be described independently, only as a joint state of the whole.

In an entangled system, asking what state is particle A in? is not just unanswerable. It’s the wrong question. Particle A does not have a state. The system has a state. And that state contains both particles, inseparably, as a single mathematical object.

The chicken and the egg became entangled.

And an entangled system cannot be asked which came first, because in an entangled system there is no which. There is only the whole. The superposition. The joint wavefunction that contains both identities simultaneously — and can only collapse into a specific answer when someone chooses to measure it. When someone, from outside, imposes a classical question on a quantum reality.

The answer to which came first is always produced by the question. Change the question, change the answer. Stop asking the question, and neither the chicken nor the egg exists in a definite prior state.

They are both. They are neither. They are the superposition of all possible chickens and all possible eggs, spread across all possible timelines, waiting for an observer to collapse them into something.

And the observer is you.

The Oldest Argument Was Never About Priority

Søren Kierkegaard wrote that life must be lived forward but can only be understood backward. He meant it as a lament — the human condition of perpetual retrospective comprehension, always catching up to a life that keeps arriving before we can make sense of it.

But there’s another reading. And honestly, this one hit differently.

If life can only be understood backward, then understanding is always a retrospective act. It is always a measurement performed on a system that existed in superposition before the measurement was made. You did not have a definite life and then understand it. You understood it — and in understanding it, you collapsed it into the particular life you now remember having.

The chicken-egg question was never asking about chickens or eggs.

It was asking about this: whether reality precedes understanding, or whether understanding participates in the construction of reality.

Physics, following the thread far enough, answers: both. Classical reality — the solid world of definite things in definite sequences — emerges from a quantum substrate in which things are indefinite until they interact. Understanding is a form of interaction. Observation collapses superposition. The act of asking which came first is what produces a first.

Before you asked, there was only the wave function. The entangled system. The superposition of all possible causal orderings, spread across all possible branches of all possible universes.

The Vedantic tradition named this state the Brahman — the undifferentiated totality from which all particular things arise. Not a thing, not a non-thing.

The ground from which the distinction between things and non-things is itself generated. Neti neti: not this, not that. Every particular answer is wrong, not because the question is unanswerable, but because the question is too small for the reality it’s pointing at.

The chicken is not prior to the egg. The egg is not prior to the chicken. Prior and posterior are categories that apply within time — and time is the story we tell about the configurations, not a feature of the configurations themselves.

In essence, both came first, and neither came first. And the universe, finding this answer insufficient, generated you — an observer. Capable of asking the question so that something, at least, could be made definite.

What the Fable Is Really About

The chicken and the egg spent what felt like eternity travelling every universe. They upskilled. They trained. They became.

What they became was this: the question itself. The question — alive, unresolved, generative, pointing at something larger than either of them.

This is what non-dual philosophy has always said about the deepest questions. The point of a koan is not to answer it. The point is to become the question until the distinction between asker and asked dissolves. Until you stop looking for the floor of causality and start living in the suspended recognition that there is no floor. That the loop goes all the way down. That the fixed point is not a flaw in the system but the system’s most fundamental feature.

So the chicken and the egg, in the most ideal reality, the one where they code could finally crack the code, did not find the answer.

They became both and neither at the same time.

Which is, it turns out, the only answer that survives every universe.

Randomness, in the end, is the name we give to patterns we are not yet large enough to see.

Beginnings, it turns out, are the name we give to loops we have not yet learned to inhabit.

Sources and further reading:

Richard Feynman, QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (1985); Julian Barbour, The End of Time (1999); Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time (2018); Bell’s Theorem and the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics; Brouwer Fixed-Point Theorem, Mathematische Annalen (1911); Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, Zeitschrift für Physik (1927); Hugh Everett III, Relative State Formulation of Quantum Mechanics (1957); T-symmetry, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; Kalachakra Tantra, Tibetan Buddhist canon; Advaita Vedanta — Adi Shankaracharya, Vivekachudamani.