think or thwim

When he’s not cracking heads, he has time to think about the big questions. This is a 2001 Errol Morris profile of Langan called The Smartest Man in the World:

Actually, Langan and his neuropsychologist wife, Gina, moved to a horse ranch in Missouri in 2004, but that doesn’t make for a good headline.

In this 2001 paper, Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU), he describes his theory of the relationship between mind and reality.

The Art of Knowing is a 2004 collection of Langan’s philosophical essays in self-published book form.

For a while he also did a question and answer column. In one he answered “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”:

Contrary to popular belief, this age-old dilemma actually has a very straightforward solution. First, you must specify what kind of egg you mean. If you mean any kind of egg, then the egg came first (because chickens were preceded on the evolutionary timeline by, for example, egg-laying fish, insects and dinosaurs). If, on the other hand, you mean a chicken egg, then you must specify whether this means (a) an egg laid by a chicken, (b) an egg containing a chicken, or (c) an egg laid by and containing a chicken. In cases (a) and (c), the answer is by definition the chicken (if the answer were the egg, then the egg could not have been laid by a chicken).

In case (b), the usual and most interesting interpretation, the answer is the egg. This is because interspecies mutations separating a new species from its parent species occur in reproductive rather than somatic DNA, i.e. in germ cells rather than body cells. (Germ cells include the sperm and egg cells produced in the reproductive tracts of male and female animals respectively.) Since germ cells are merely produced, but not somatically expressed, by the parents of the organism(s) whose biological information they encode, their expression begins in the egg containing the offspring. So the egg contains a chicken, but was not laid by a chicken. (See how easy that was?)