April 11, 2022
“Turtles All the Way Down”: The Problem of Infinite Regress
Forget about the existence of God, life after death, the meaning of life. There is only one real question in philosophy – and no, with apologies to Albert Camus, it’s not about suicide. It’s the problem of infinite regress, particularly in a metaphysical framework.
“Turtles all the way down” is a metaphor used to explicate the problem of infinite regress in metaphysics. There are many variants, but the basic idea is that someone (usually a member of a so-called primitive tribe), when asked about the origin or existence of Earth, argues that the world rests on a giant turtle. Faced with the question, but where then does that turtle stand on, he replies: “You don’t fool me, it’s turtles all the way down“.
To us modern Westerners, the problem of infinite regress usually appears when, as children perhaps raised to believe in the existence of God, we wonder: “But who made God?” We were never offered an answer, because there was none. “God was always there”, came the usual non-reply.
But even those of us (such as myself) who don’t believe in a supreme being, are still deeply troubled by infinite regress. It just doesn’t feel right, as we’ll see in this post.
Infinite Regress as a Problem of Metaphysics
To be clear, the concept of infinite regress has many manifestations. It creates problematic aspects in various areas of philosophy, such as logic, and you can find all sorts of analyses and repercussions.
My goal is to keep this post accessible to a lay audience. My personal interest in infinite regress is also clearly in its metaphysical aspects: What it entails for the ultimate “what it is” of existence and the universe.
As a result, I will only focus on the “turtles all the way down” aspect, and do so using a simple, conversational style. In effect, I’m trying to discover whatever available to us to discover through the act of writing this text. If you’re interested in more theoretical analyses, there are some wonderful resources online.
Infinite Regress Chains: Who Made the Turtle who Made God who Made the Big Bang?
As I mentioned in the introduction, even if you don’t believe in God (or giant turtles), the problem of infinite regress in a metaphysical framework is impossible to ignore. Unless you ignore it deliberately, and back to Albert Camus and philosophical suicide we go.
Otherwise, if you obey your natural human instinct of wanting to know the truth, you’ll ask yourself: What existed before the Big Bang?
Though there are answers available (speculative ones), consistent with purely scientific frameworks, there is a problem. They answer in a way that doesn’t remove the infinite regress issue. Indeed, they introduce it!
But new theoretical physics research has recently revealed a possible window into the very early universe, showing that it may not be “very early” after all. Instead it may be just the latest iteration of a bang-bounce cycle that has been going on for … well, at least once, and possibly forever.
Space.com “What Happened Before the Big Bang”
This is remarkably reminiscent of the “turtles all the way down” formulation. To be absolutely clear, my intention is not to belittle the scientific method (or alternatively, to prop up the folk tales involving giant turtles or elephants). Rather, to show that there is a deeper problem involved.
Is the Answer Unknown or the Question Unanswerable?
There are known unknowns and unknown unknowns. If you roll a pair of dice behind my back, I don’t know what the result is, but I can tell you with 100% certainty (assuming the dice are ordinary and your cat didn’t eat one of them) that it will be between 2 and 12. But if you tell me you have a bag containing an unknown number of dice, perhaps dice with figures other than 1-6, and you roll an unknown number of them, there’s no way for me to tell you anything.
The first case is an example of a known unknown; the second, of an unknown unknown. But there is more: Questions that don’t make sense.
The Marital Status of No. 5
If I asked you, “Is number 5 married?” you’ll laugh then look at me in disbelief. You’ll say “No, don’t be an idiot”. Then I’ll say, “Ah, then number 5 is a bachelor”. To which you’ll laugh (or punch me in the face) and say “No”.
As the perceptive reader that you are, you likely see the chance for an infinite regress there:
- If one is not married, then one is a bachelor.
- If one is not a bachelor, then one is married.
>> Is no.5 married? >> No; then no.5 is a bachelor >> Ah; if no.5 is not a bachelor, then no.5 is married >> Ah; then no.5 is a bachelor >> etc. etc
What this little example demonstrates is that some questions simply don’t make sense. There is an insidious element there, however, complicating matters further:
How do we know whether a question is sense-making or not?
Is “Who Made the God who Made the Turtle?” a Sense-Making Question?
As these tongue-in-cheek headings perhaps indicate, such questions are so bizarre that they approach the absurd (ah, back to Albert Camus we go). But the real issue here is to separate whether asking “what existed before God/the Big Bang/the First Turtle” is:
- sense-making
- answerable
- unanswerable
- not sense-making
- only to us
- to everything
It’s the last set in particular that intrigues me. If we assumed the question “Who made God?” is not sense-making, is there something inherent about our humanity and ability to conceptualize that prevents us from being able to make sense of it? Or, rather, it’s universally not sense-making. To me, that seems like a critical point.
To be clear, I don’t claim something in the style of “aliens/other gods could make sense of the answer”. That would lead to more infinite regress, probably. Rather, I wonder whether all beings – in the sense we can understand the term “being” – are necessarily unable to formulate the question.
The Importance of Establishing the Validity of Asking
“What is the weight of the color green?” is a question that, like the marital status of no.5, does not have an answer. If anyone attempted to offer one, it would be a not-even-wrong answer – see the post on solipsism. To me, it seems obvious that establishing whether a question is valid or not is of paramount importance.
So, can we ask “who made the first turtle?”
I would have to say that, in this form, the answer must be no. “Who made” entails an entity/agent before the “first turtle” (whichever way you can put it).
How about if we rephrased it to “how did the first turtle materialize?”
This seems better, but I’m troubled by the implied temporality involved: a passage from a state of there not being a turtle to the state of there being one (if this sounds familiar, you likely remembered this). It almost feels as if time itself perpetuates (!) the predicament, by becoming part of the infinite regress chain.
Perhaps the problem lies in us.
It’s not You, It’s Me: Anthropocentrism and Infinite Regress
Anthropocentric behavior is, to an extent, inevitable. As with stupidity – it’s hard to know you’re stupid when… you’re stupid – it’s hard to understand we’re biased and limited because of our humanity, precisely because of… our humanity.
To put it plainly: Some things are simply beyond our grasp.
Evolution has given us a brain that is remarkably capable. It’s stunning, utterly breathtaking to realize we’ve been able to move from caves and hunting with rocks and spears – themselves an incredible achievement by comparison to other animals – to sending probes to Pluto (and beyond), that transmitted back to us detailed, color images and other scientific data from another celestial body.
Yet our brain, for all its magnificence, can’t handle infinite regress, the way it can’t quite conceptualize more than three dimensions or quantum mechanics – the calculations work fine, with stunning precision; the whole thing is just not intuitive.
In the end, we just have to accept the depth of our ignorance:
- We don’t know.
- Perhaps we won’t ever know.
- Perhaps it’s not possible we will ever know.
The last one in particular is a very difficult thing to accept, counter to our innate curiosity. But it might be inescapable.
6 Comments
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Way above my pay grade! I’m perfectly happy to stop at ‘I exist, therefore God exists, because I certainly didn’t make me.’
Or in physics terms (my original profession, after all), ‘What was before the Big Bang?’
And I don’t need an answer – the problem doesn’t bother me. I’m not of a philosophical turn of mind (drives my friends crazy) beyond humans being kind to each other by choice – and some, like the current warlord of the former Soviet Union, being horrible by choice. Humans, them I’m interested in, and them I write about.
I don’t know if this will make any sense, but I’m not troubled by the question (i.e. “who made the first turtle/God/the Big Bang). What troubles me is precisely that the question seems nonsensical. That is, it troubles me that we can’t even pose the question. Such epistemological dead-ends are frustrating 😀
They are frustrating, as questions such as is there anything God made so heavy that He can’t lift it?
We rely on logic. Logic fails us at these points. But the Greeks already tried gods that were more like superhumans than like something higher and different, and all it got them was silly stories.
There has to be a difference in quality, just the same as there is a qualitative difference between plants and animals (yes, I know it’s a rather smooth spectrum). I don’t expect to understand it. It affects my life in that I’m as optimistic as I can be given my limitations, and I am trying to follow a moral code that says things like forgive your enemies. And I know I didn’t exist at one point, and that I will die. And that by having children, I am condemning them to die (unfortunately, I didn’t think of that one until after my oldest was born!).
We all have to negotiate all that.
That, I believe, is a linguistic question. Why do I say that? Because when one asks a question, one can be sure that one is doing something, that is, questioning, even without knowing the content of the question. When one asks about the question, one cannot even know what one is doing, because the question impinges on the very act of questioning. Languages can do that. An infinite sentence might be unbearably tedious, but it is perfectly possible. That’s why the idealist tradition has answered that thinking is a self-founding activity: thought founds itself — a bottomless pit. Hence, is not so bad an answer, because the question itself is not a mere question of something showing up as available in the spacetime continuum, but rather an existential question, that is, what is the meaning of this and that existing? It is clearly not a mere case of positivistic empirical questioning: how did the floating stone (a.k.a planet) come about? That is almost trivial to answer. Rather, — much more intriguing. Even asking for the origin of the universe could be just a limit-case: since for anything to exist, in this empirical sense, means it appears in the (or is it a?) spacetime continuum, and since the (or is it a?) universe is equated with the spacetime continuum, then it becomes impossible to answer because it means one is asking for the conditions of appearance (of “showing up”) to, themselves, appear, which, following positivistic logic, is impossible, as a natural happening should not — logically — be its own ground or foundation. If to explain is understood as to provide causes that instigate the explained to show up in the spacetime continuum which are not the explained itself, then asking for the origin of the universe is vain, it becomes a question of circular (lack of) logic. Yet another possibility is simply that asking for beginnings and endings is anthropic (human-centered) projection: since humans are born and eventually die (they begin and end), they project this thinking to all things, as if everything had to begin and to end (to be born and to die) somehow. Thus, it is very well possible that asking for endpoints of (probably) infinite things is just an arrogant questioning.
I think you’re right to point out there’s some anthropocentric element in the idea of “before/after”, “beginning/ending”. More still, as I think you implied, there’s also anthropocentric elements in the very act of asking a question (let alone expecting an answer). As I replied to Alicia above, such epistemological dead-ends drive me insane!
I don’t even think it’s an epistemological dead-end, but rather, it is a very curious functioning of language: once we look at the question “If 5 is not married, then is it a bachelor?”, once we look at it, we should not do away with it as if it was nonsensical, for it is not. It is unsensical only on the most superficial level that acknowledges that numbers are not defined by any sort of marital relationships. But on the deepest level that it still makes some sort of sense, unlike the sentence “asblughferhg shnukglknes”, then we have something to think about. Why is questioning — a fundamentally linguistic operation — capable of generating nonsensical, yet meaningful questions, if only for the bare fact that they are questions? This shows that language is capable of existing despite not making sense. Thus, language is not tied to meaning, to sense making, in any fundamental way. This is revealing and revolutionary by every measure. (In other words: written language lacks gesturing, spoken language lacks space between words and punctuation marks, but we recognize both written and spoken English as English, thus, English is not tied to any of these “substances” in which it manifests itself, thus the linguists were all wrong in privileging spoken over written language. In still other words: if there is something precisely literary, i.e., not poetic, not tied to spoken language, to epos, it lies precisely in realising that.)