![]() Since the joke usually attributes this, via William James, to Hindu philosophies, perhaps there is some actual version of it in Eastern traditions, I really don't know. Yet I've never heard of anyone subscribing to this "infinite regress" metaphysics.Īnecdotally, yes, there is a famous example of such a metaphysics, usually referred to as "turtles all the way down." My question is mainly a historical one: Have there been any religions or philosophical metaphysical systems that have held this view? That "Yes indeed, the universe has a creator, but that creator is in turn part of another universe which itself has its own creator, and so on."? It seems to me that this is no more farfetched than Berkeley's subjective idealism, or Nietzsche's eternal recurrence.It is almost an inevitable logical step to wonder if we are not the same? Can it be that we are just characters in some metaphysical demiurge's video game or children's fantasy book series? And that demiurge is herself a character in a higher level demiurge's work of fiction? And that these universes have some sort of ontological reality, as thoughts embodied in the minds of their authors and in the mediums in which this fiction is portrayed. On a more contemporary note, it can be argued that humans are gods to the characters of the various fictional universes they create and manipulate in novels, movies, and video games. I get the feeling that this is somehow connected to the concept of (causal) infinite regress, but I can't pinpoint the connection. Nietzsche, among others, believed in the doctrine of eternal return, that the universe is spatially finite but temporally infinite, and everything that has ever occurred will occur again, in some sort of cosmic infinite loop. Why hasn't anyone "rolled with it", so to speak? As in: "Fair enough, this universe was created by God, and God was created by Super-God, and Super-God was created by Meta-Super-God, etc."? This counter argument is usually colloquially stated as: "Well if God must have created the universe, doesn't it stand to reason that someone must have created God as well?". One of the replies to the argument from first cause for the universe being created by God is that there is no apriori reason against there simply being an infinite number of causes, or an infinite regress.
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