Which came first?

I haven’t written a lesson note for a long while now and it hurts so much that it kills me if I do not to write anything relevant enough to anyone who reads this blog.

A have several lessons in store for you and made possible with the assistance of another guest teacher, Itoshiki Nozomu-sensei. He is the second teacher I have collaborated with. In case you didn’t know there was such a thing as collaboration, you can check out the lesson by the combined efforts of yours truly and Sakata Gintoki-sensei.

Admit it. You, too, were baffled by this “egg-or-hen” question. They say the answer’s the hen, but where does the hen come from? It absolutely has to be an egg first. Do we still attempt to ask? Yes? No?

And I want you to DESPAIR over more questions.

So what’s the point in all these things? Do they even make sense? Do they not?

Just like the famous phrase, “Every beginning is an end, and every end is a beginning”, there might be things we just gotta leave as they are as we just let good and bad things happen in our lives, teaching us valuable lessons each day. Anyway, that isn’t what I wanted to say. What I wanted to ask, rather, was how can we say if something is an end while something is a beginning? Do we have concrete bases to formulate our answers to our daily musings that are just like the “hen-or-egg” question?

Let me go back to that famous phrase. If we study well, not really study, but analyze a little bit deeper without regarding the encouragement it is meant to relay the phrase, the meanings of the words cancel out. If we write our “answer” mathematically, the totality of the phrase simply equates to 0. Nothingness. Nonsense. I don’t know what exactly I am to make of it, but I’ll try interpreting the simplified answer that we have now.

Of course, not every question there is in this universe is similar to the “hen-or-egg” question, so this type of questions in this lesson is simply a class of many questions. Now, read again the questions in the photos above. Do have an answer in mind? Yes? Then, can you justify your answers without using the option that you didn’t choose? Good luck with that.

Now, let us go back to that famous phrase again. Oh, we’re running in circles. (“Oh my. The author’s attempting humor here.”) Good luck to me. Anyway. If the beginning is the end and the end is the beginning, then doesn’t that mean that mathematically, beginning = end and end = beginning. So can we regard these two words, ‘beginning’ and ‘end’, as synonyms? If we disregard our vocabulary, then maybe we can do that, but we cannot disregard the difference in the nuance of each word. Equating them in the famous phrase is a philosophical way of saying that even something that begins has to end and another beginning has to happen. And that beginning ver.2 has to have an end as well. So on and so forth. See? This is also exactly what the phrase means. We are caught in a Mobius loop. And that loop is related to our perception of time.

In the first place, who has invented the concept of time? Humanity? If it was humankind, then in exactly which point in human history was the concept of time realized? But even if we do know nothing of the answer, why does even “time” exists? If we try to expand our senses, we can’t say for sure how long time has been present. And since we know the vastness of time, the beginning and the end of our lives is a very tiny portion of the whole stretch, that perhaps if we subtract the time of our birth to the time of our death, it’s almost zero. (Though you may agree with me using mathematics that there exists limits of functions and that the answer would never be zero due to an asymptote on the time of birth)

I have drifted away way too much. Let me end this lesson with some Raptor Memes. 😛 Special thanks to Zetsubou-sensei for the questions worth contemplating. In the end, I wasn’t really able to come up with a convincing answer for myself. Nothingness. Nonsense.