Empedocles

So it turns out that one of the ancient Greek philosophers essentially anticipated my ideas regarding the "and" and the "or" 2500 or so years ago.  Empedocles called the principles "love" and "strife", where love represented the coming together and strife the breaking apart into a thing's constituent parts.   He also saw a cyclical process in which one precedes the other, and even, to a large extent, anticipated evolutionary theory by proclaiming that some groups of parts will randomly come together and survive, while others will not.  As we've seen, the cyclical view of history has largely proven correct with great empires, whether it be the Roman empire or the Soviet Union, imploding, different countries uniting and or being absorbed by others again and again and again.  Similarly, the cyclical theory of love and strife holds on a cosmic level with the big bang,   dust coalescing to form suns and planets,  lighter elements combining and becoming compressed in suns to form heavier elements, suns exploding when their lives expire, black holes absorbing matter and eventually compressing it to the point that new bangs occur and new universes are formed. As I've demonstrated, love and strife are at work everywhere, whether it be on a mathematical,  a molecular, cellular, linguistic, biomechanical or evolutionary level. Empedocles was right.  The PreSocratics, including the Sophists, were the greatest.  Socrates and Aristotle ruined everything.