chicken-and-egg-problem

2021, line of thought

My bachelor's thesis foresees that the price per ridepooling user is calculated as the price per ridepooling vehicle divided by the number of people using it.

I faced the following causality dilemma: is the number of ridepooling users causing the price per user or is the price per user causing the number of users? With this problem expressed mathematically, the higher programming language 'Julia' is overwhelmed. That means, the computer calculates in an eternal loop, but cannot spit out a result, but instead fails: "StackOverflowError". But not only computers are overwhelmed with this problem: also human beings - mathematicians, biologists, natural scientists, and philosophers - have already dealt with this phenomenon. And here comes the connection to chicken! The well-known problem: which came first - the chicken or the egg? describes exactly this causality dilemma. But while the chicken-and-egg problem is somehow solved - it was the egg which must have been first according to Darwin's theory of evolution - other causality dilemmata (including the demand and supply obstacle of ridepooling) are still unsolved.

Karl Popper writes in his book "Objective knowledge - an evolutionary approach" that there are two kinds of systems in our mind: clocks and clouds. Clouds are chaotic and unpredictable whereas clocks are regular and predictable. All systems are located somewhere between clouds and clocks. Determinism is a philosophical logic which assumes that all events are necessarily causally determined and coincidence does not play a role. According to Popper, determinists assume that all systems are clocks, even if we still perceive them as clouds whereas indeterminists believe in coincidence, thus in the existence of clouds. The photo series "Ahnengalerie" shows that trivialities in our everyday life - as a gallery with ancestor pictures which at first glance does not represent a causal dilemma - can be either a clock, or a cloud, depending on the observer.

clocks are regular and predictable

clouds are chaotic and unpredictable