Infinite Regression
#problem-solving #note/boat🚤
There's an old joke about a heckler who interrupts an astrophysics lecture to insist that the Earth is flat and supported on the back of elephants standing on a giant turtle. "What supports the turtle?" asks the lecturer. "Another turtle." "What supports that turtle?" "You can't fool me," replies the heckler triumphantly: "it's turtles from there on down."
This is called an infinite regress—and it's a logical fallacy.
"That theory is a bad explanation," philosopher David Deutsch writes, "not because it fails to explain everything (no theory does), but because what it leaves unexplained is effectively the same as what it purports to explain in the first place." The theory that the designer of the biosphere was designed by another designer, and so on ad infinitum, is another example. So is the idea that you can delegate all your work to someone else, who delegates it to someone else, who delegates it to someone else.
An infinite regress doesn't solve the problem. It just pushes it back one step—and then another, and another—without ever actually addressing it.