The Collaborative International Dictionary
infinite regress \infinite regress\, infinite regression \infinite regression\n. (Philosophy, Logic) A causal relationship transmitted through an indefinite number of terms in a series, with no term that begins the causal chain.
Wiktionary
n. (context logic English) A regress into an infinite sequence of propositions in an attempt to found the truth of the proposition Pi on the truth of the proposition Pi+1.
Wikipedia
An infinite regress in a series of propositions arises if the truth of proposition P requires the support of proposition P, the truth of proposition P requires the support of proposition P, ... , and the truth of proposition P requires the support of proposition P and n approaches infinity.
Distinction is made between infinite regresses that are " vicious" and those that are not.
"Infinite Regress" is the 101st episode of Star Trek: Voyager, the seventh episode of the fifth season.
Usage examples of "infinite regress".
Every time consciousness contemplates itself, it must fall into an infinite regress.
Our familiar universe of galaxies and stars, planets and people, would be a single elementary particle in the next universe up, the first step of another infinite regress.
Locked into an infinite regress of incapacity, he stood absolutely still and retreated into the kaleidoscope of unconnected images behind his eyes.
Quite apart from this problem of infinite regress, naive preformationism neglects the fact, which was hardly less obvious in the seventeenth century than now, that children inherit attributes from the mother as well as the father.
There had been a time, the meeting when General Aur and his new Minister of Trade had come to the station, when McHogue had made the assertion that an infinite regress, artificial realities nested within a spiral of hallucinations, was impossible, both in theory and practice.
Yet each new version only highlights its own inadequacies, forcing me to expand my ultimate goal, condemning it to the status of a Holy Grail at the end of a divergent infinite regress.
There was a slightly embarrassed pause while Morgan registered this fact, and the others admitted that they knew, and he showed that he knew they knew - all without a word being uttered, in the kind of psychological infinite regress that occurs when a group of people share completely a secret which nobody will ever mention again.
He found it disturbing in some way to be alone with her, and she was disturbed by his disturbance, and that was upsetting to him, and so if went shuttling back and forth between them in infinite regress, like a reflection trapped between two mirrors.
I don't think we'll be rewarded with a sense of genuine precision until we get as close as possible to a kind of beneficially corrective infinite regress.
And since he clearly felt the same, there was a kind of infinite regress of love and respect underlying their relationship.
If the history of biology is anything to go by, we shall begin by discovering seemingly universal principles, and then realize that the intense variability of the biological world means a seemingly infinite regress of apparently minor differences, to which we shall struggle to give meaning.
We've walled all the galleries in panels of nickel stripped with platinum, and scored the panel surfaces with iterated patterns that the robots run at night, Escher reproductions, mirrors offset for infinite regress, scenes from Earth, you should see it!