Why is infinite regress impossible

Thus, a falling dominoes series is an invalid example of a series of simultaneous moved movers, since the first domino may be down before the last one starts to fall. Bearing in mind observations about submicroscopic physical causes made above, a valid example of simultaneous causation of becoming might be a series of contiguous gears in motion simultaneously, so that the earlier move the later in what is, in effect, a single motion. If the earlier gears quit moving, so do the later ones.

Causes of being appear intuitively more simultaneous, since they do not entail motion which takes place through time. But physical examples are sometimes challenged as being instances of becoming and, alternately, metaphysical instances require philosophical proof, for example, the argument St.

Thomas makes that things which can possibly be or not be must be caused to exist. The key takeaway from all this is that it simply does not matter whether one is talking about causes of being or of becoming: the causes in both cases must be simultaneous with their effects. When the cause of coming-to-be ceases causing, the coming-to-be of the effect ceases — just as when the cause of being ceases causing, the being effected ceases to exist.

Properly understood, causal series of becoming are just as temporally simultaneous as those of being. Extrinsic causes may be efficient or final. Proper causes are those precisely required to produce a specific effect and prescind from accidental or causally non-relevant associations with either cause or effect. In contrast, a merely accidentally ordered regression, such as the procreative one leading back through all our ancestors, could potentially go on to infinity — as Aristotle appears to say with respect to the possible eternity of species.

Consider a series in which the being of A is the final effect and B the sufficient reason for A, with C the reason for B, and D for C, and so forth.

Since B explains A, and C explains B, and D explains C -- as long as the causally prior reasons regress to infinity, every link in the chain is explained, since each one is explained by the prior link. Since the whole chain is nothing but the sum of all the links and every link is explained, the entire chain is explained and there appears to be no need for a first sufficient reason for the being of A.

Or again, consider such a series from the standpoint of causality as such. We have a final effect which is explained by a regression of intermediate prior proper causes. Other than the final effect, every prior cause is intermediate, since each one is followed by an effect and preceded by its own proper cause. Remember all causal links exist and act simultaneously in accord with proper causality. Is there anything about an infinite regression of such intermediate causes that requires a first cause?

It says nothing about a first cause. As long as the causality of each intermediate cause is fully explained by a prior intermediate cause, and as long as the causal regression does not have a beginning point, each intermediate cause is fully explained. Since the whole chain is nothing but the sum of the intermediates, and each intermediate is explained by its prior intermediate, the whole chain appears to be explained without any need for a first cause.

Yet, to understand the opposing and correct side of the argument, imagine a surgical incision in the process of being cut. And an arm is needed to move the hand. While this example is deliberately abbreviated, its initial elements are instructive.

The scalpel, hand, and arm are all intermediate causes. But, what makes them intermediate? What does each contribute to the causal chain?

Whether the intermediate causes are limited or unlimited in number, they cannot alone explain the causal process that runs through the entire chain.

Solely a first cause that initiates the entire chain can do that — a first cause uncaused. Now, to reconsider that chain of intermediate reasons described above, we see that the same problem arises. He is everywhere. There are no edges or limits to His presence, nor are there pockets where He is absent. If the universe is infinite, it has always been infinite. At the Big Bang, it was infinitely dense. Since then it has just been getting less dense as space has expanded. Infinite lovers are in love with love itself.

Finite lovers are in love with the expectation of what love can bring them. Meaning and Description It means infinite and without boundaries. Are they still together? No — at least as far as we can tell. Born on August 6, , he grew up in Sheffield, England. As of now, he is years-old. The zodiac sign of Morgz is Leo…. Morgan Hudson Wikis. Morgz started the channel back in when he was around he was around 12 years old. In December, he decided to quit high school to concentrate more on making YouTube videos.

Begin typing your search term above and press enter to search. Press ESC to cancel. He says ibid. If we avoid the incompatibility of the three characteristics by asserting that M is present, has been future, and will be past, we are constructing a second A series, within which the first falls, in the same way in which events fall within the first… the second A series will suffer from the same difficulty as the first, which can only be removed by placing it inside a third A series.

The same principle will place the third inside a fourth, and so on without end. You can never get rid of the contradiction, for, by the act of removing it from what is to be explained, you produce it over again in the explanation. And so the explanation is invalid. See Dummett and Mellor 72—74 for two among many presentations of the argument along similar lines.

See Cameron Ch. But that is puzzling, given that things change and, hence, the way things were is incompatible with the way things are now. How can they both contribute to the way reality is if they are incompatible? The defender of the A-series replies by insisting that in giving the complete account of how reality is we have to take seriously the fact that reality changes and that it is, therefore, different ways successively , and there is no inconsistency in things being one way and then another, incompatible, way.

McTaggart responds by restating this response in terms of second-order A-properties. And McTaggart will respond that this is to invoke third-order A-properties—being present past past , being past future future , etc. And the same problem will arise, and invite the same response, which will lead to the same problem concerning fourth-order A-properties, which will invite the same response again … and so on, ad infinitum.

Some philosophers see the regress as demonstrating that any attempt to describe the world in A-theoretic terms is ultimately inconsistent, and see the A-theorist as merely invoking another inconsistent account of reality every time they attempt to explain away this inconsistency. At every stage, they say, we can remove the apparent contradiction by distinguishing the times at which the events have incompatible [A-properties]. They ignore the fact that the way they distinguish these times … only generates more contradictions.

Skow , 87 , e. And even an infinite sequence of false allegations does not add up to a good argument. If one starts out happy with the notion of succession —i. We start out with a set of incompatible properties that are never had by anything simultaneously but are held by things successively; in stating that those properties are had successively we make salient a new set of incompatible properties, but these are also never had by anything simultaneously, only successively; this makes salient yet another set of incompatible properties, and so on ad infinitum.

There is never, at any stage, a contradiction, if the notion of succession is indeed in good standing, for we are never forced to say that a thing has incompatible properties, only that a thing successively has properties that cannot be had simultaneously.

The regress, then, looks vicious or benign depending on whether one is content to grant the legitimacy of the notion of temporal succession. In section 1 we looked at cases where an infinite regress is taken to reveal some feature that might, possibly depending on your other theoretical commitments, be taken to reveal a feature of a theory independent of its leading to regress that is a reason to reject it.

But sometimes the regress itself is taken to be an objectionable feature of the theory that yields it. If this infinite regress argument is successful then our choices are either:.

Infinite regress arguments used to motivate Foundationalism or Coherentism appear in many different areas of philosophy. Here are some highlights:. Metaphysicians have wanted to account for the very existence, or nature, of some things by appealing to things on which they ontologically depend: for example, a complex object exists and is the way it is because its parts exist and are the way they are; a set exists because its members exist; etc.

See Fine and Koslicki for discussion. But of course the things the dependent beings depend on must themselves exist as well. Some have been suspicious of the idea that this can go on ad infinitum , with every thing being ontologically dependent on some new thing s , and thus have argued for Metaphysical Foundationalism: the view that there is a collection of absolutely fundamental [ 4 ] entities upon which all else ultimately ontologically depends. Aquinas, e.

We shall see more examples of Metaphysical Foundationalists below. See also the supplementary document on. Metaphysical Coherentism—the view that ontological dependence could be a holistic phenomenon—has received few defenders, but see Barnes , Nolan , Priest Chs.

Epistemologists want to account for the justification of our beliefs. We do not want to believe at random, we want our beliefs to be justified —that is, we want there to be a reason to believe the propositions we believe. But those reasons will be further propositions, and if our initial belief is to be justified, so surely must the reasons for that belief be, and so we must appeal to yet more propositions, and so on.

Many—going back to Sextus Empiricus Outlines of Pyrrhonism PH I, —9 —have thought that this cannot proceed ad infinitum , and that the only serious options are Epistemic Foundationalism—the view that there is a class of propositions whose justification does not come via some other justified propositions, and that can provide a reason for everything else we believe—or Epistemic Coherentism—the view that a collection of propositions can collectively be justified in virtue of the web of epistemic relations they stand in to one another.

As well as asking about the source of justification for our moral beliefs see e. Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, a thought that some things were good because we desire them for the sake of something else that is good. And so Aristotle argues that there must be a Highest Good—something that is desired for its own sake—that other things can be good in virtue of aiming towards this highest good.

Aristotle is a Moral Foundationalist: there is something whose goodness does not get explained by reference to anything else, by means of which the goodness of other things is accounted for.

Explicit statements of anything other than Foundationalism in the moral case are hard to come by. Whether in metaphysics, epistemology, or ethics, Foundationalism has often been seen as the default, orthodox, view, with Coherentism being seen as the radical alternative.

Infinitism is often simply dismissed, or not even considered as a live option. To focus our inquiry, consider the case of a complex object and its proper parts. Some metaphysicians have considered the possibility that there are gunky objects: objects such that every part of them itself has proper parts.

And so on. But all we need is that there are some such collections, from which we can pick arbitrarily to get the next collection in the sequence. So we form this infinite sequence by taking one item from each collection that formed the previous infinite sequence: namely that item which was used to give us the collection of things that came next in the series.

Assuming that complex objects are ontologically dependent on their proper parts, we now have an infinite regress of entities, each of which is ontologically dependent on the next. Such an infinite regress has been thought by some metaphysicians to be objectionable, leading them to reject the possibility of gunk. Leibniz says —87, 85 :. Where there are only beings by aggregation [composite objects], there are no real beings.

For every being by aggregation presupposes beings endowed with real unity [simples], because every being derives its reality only from the reality of those beings of which it is composed, so that it will not have any reality at all if each being of which it is composed is itself a being by aggregation, a being for which we must still seek further grounds for its reality, grounds which can never be found in this way, if we must always continue to seek for them.

See Fine for discussion of the direction of ontological dependence. See Cameron and Maurin for discussion of the difference between infinite regresses where ontological dependence runs upwards from ones where it runs downwards. Clark , and also Johansson and the discussion in Maurin Unlike Leibniz, Schaffer grants the possibility of gunky objects, but thinks that this possibility is precisely a reason to deny that complex objects are always ontologically dependent on their parts.

Leibniz and Schaffer advocate Metaphysical Foundationalism : the view that there have to be some things that are absolutely fundamental—dependent on nothing—on which all else ultimately depends. Why think this? The idea seems to be that a dependent entity only has the being it has on condition of something else having being. An analogy may help. Suppose Anne has no sugar, and needs some. She can borrow a bag of sugar from Breanna.

Now Anne has a bag of sugar. Where did it come from? Easy—it came from Breanna, who is now a bag of sugar down. But suppose Breanna borrowed a bag of sugar from Craig in order to then pass it on to Anne. Ultimately, from Craig, who ends up a bag of sugar down.

But suppose Craig borrowed a bag of sugar from Devi … and so on, ad infinitum. Then where did the bag of sugar come from? At the end of the infinite sequence, Anne is one bag of sugar up, and nobody is a bag of sugar down, for everyone after Anne simply borrowed a bag of sugar, and then passed it on to the next person in the chain.

The infinite regress seems to create sugar from nowhere: pleasant, perhaps, but metaphysically suspicious all the same. As with sugar, likewise with being—or justification, or goodness, or whatever feature we aim to account for. And for any finite chain, no matter how long, we can say where the being of any dependent entity ultimately comes from: from the fundamental thing s at the bottom of the chain.

The explanation of where it came from is always postponed, and its presence in the system as a whole unexplained. So, at least, goes the regress objection. Ricki Bliss, e. But Bliss argues that it is not necessarily a mark against infinitely descending chains of ontological dependence that it leaves this global fact—why does anything have being in the first place?

She says ibid. All the regress can tell us is how each individual member has the property under consideration, namely, in dependence upon something else.

The appearance of an infinite regress should not lead us to conclude that nothing within the regress has the property under consideration—nor has its possession of that property unexplained—but rather that not everything about the possession of the property that needs to be explained has been.

Contra Leibniz and Schaffer, then, Bliss rejects the idea that in an infinitely descending chain of ontological dependence, being would never be achieved. Having a property dependent on some condition is nevertheless to have that property, so there is no pressure, she argues, to conclude that nothing in the infinite series would exist.

Rather, they all exist, and the existence of each is perfectly well accounted for: it exists because the next thing in the sequence does. Everything has its being merely on some condition, but the condition is always met. Why there is an infinite chain of existing entities at all is not accounted for, but Bliss says it is a mistake to think that the regress was ever supposed to account for that. Bliss concludes that whether or not an ontological infinite regress is vicious or benign depends on what we set out to give an account of.

If all we want is an account of why each thing exists, then it is benign; but if we want an account of why there are things at all, it is vicious. In order to explain facts about my existence, we can make recourse to the existence of—or facts of the existence of—my parents, my vital organs, etc.

In order to explain these facts, we make recourse to further facts, and so on. At each stage, we have a satisfactory explanation of that for which we are seeking one.

The regress is not benign, however, if what we are seeking an explanation for is how anything exists, or has being, at all. For even at infinity, what the regress shows is that we have not explained where existence comes from. Even at infinity, we are still invoking things that exist in order to explain how anything exists at all… We encounter, at each level, the explanatory failure characteristic of a vicious infinite regress: existents whose existence we seek an explanation for are explained in terms of existents.

Whether or not a regress of grounds is vicious, therefore, will depend upon the question for which we are seeking an answer. Each of these can be in one of two states: active or passive. Given this set-up there are only two possible options: each object in the chain is active, or each is passive. But both are logically possible options: the fact that each object is only active if the next object makes it active and this sequence continues without end gives us no reason, says Priest, to reject the possibility of them being all active.

The active status of each object would be accounted for, by the active status of the previous one. All such facts get explained and since, Priest argues, it is a different fact being accounted for each time, this regress is not vicious. But echoing Bliss, Priest admits that something is not explained. If there is such an explanation, it must come from elsewhere. And if the whole infinite sequence exists, there is no explanation from within the sequence at least as to why anything exists at all.

However, there is an explanation for each particular thing as to why it exists: it exists because the next thing in the sequence does.