(April 24, 2016 at 3:38 am)robvalue Wrote: No. I'm saying claiming it to be impossible is unevidenced. We don't know exactly how things may work outside of what we can observe and test. We can have reasonable speculation, but we can't make definitive statements as per these kinds of stupid regression therefor God arguments.
If someone makes the claim that it's impossible, it's up to them to make that case. Just screwing around with logic isn't enough to prove things about reality and beyond; and infinite regression isn't a logical problem anyway. It would be some sort of restraint that causes a problem.
You are correct, we just don't know.
If the universe just keeps changing state, expanding, contracting, that's infinite iterations, not infinite regress.
The ducks are not in a row.
In any case, Infinite regress or traversing the infinite is speculative philosophy, not physics.
In physics, the idea of cause-effect relationships just doesn't describe reality very well. In fact, it isn't even clear that the traversal of time is anything but an illusion.
For example, in General Relativity, space-time is described as a single entity (called a manifold). This entity doesn't traverse time, and neither does anything within it.
It just exists across all time and space
The passage of time arises as an emergent property of certain specific configurations of the manifold.
A photon has no sense of time or direction. It can traverse any distance you care to imagine in no time whatsoever, with respect to its reference frame.
