SCENT OF THE DAY: J-d’Orient, by Jinx
Second wear. What is really cool is that J d-Orient is like J Musk 5. Both are big rose musk fragrances. J’Dorient, however, is lit up neon by big synthetics whereas J Musk stays cuddly and fuzzy rather than electrified. J Musk is more salty and feminine whereas J’Dorient is more tobaccoy and masculine—although botjh are unisex in my book. The big costus here—wet dog but with the sharpness of juniper—is another difference. Because of the strong costus element, in fact, it comes off a lot like SWR. SWR is more woody whereas this is more animalic. SWR also has much more of a focus of the highest qualities roses with a sweet greenery and glinting brightness. The Jinx in the deep dry down thoiugh gets very leathery. That is a big distinguisher.
*Let us workshop this essay about some logical problems faced by causal infinitism: the view that there can be an infinite chain of causes for an effect
Paradoxes of Causal Infinitism
Contradiction seems to result in any case of causal infinitism—forward or backward on the diachronic plane, up or down on the synchronic plane. An infinite regress of causes for an effect, that is to say, appears to be logically absurd no matter the direction of flow—indeed, even when cyclical. The following two paradoxes aim to highlight this fact. After looking at them I will then consider objections and replies. My thoughts are not settled on this matter.
Angel Paradox
Imagine that at each prior cause in a chain of causes receding infinitely back there is a unique angel that will blow its horn if and only if no angel at any prior cause already blew its horn. Now, pick any one of these causes: Cn. A horn is blown at a cause prior to Cn and so not at Cn. Why must that be? Well, a horn would have been blown at a cause prior to Cn if a horn had not been blown at a cause even prior to that. In other words, an angel at Cn-1—a cause prior to Cn—would have blown its horn if no angel at a cause prior to Cn-1 (Cn-2) already blew its horn. (To spell this out for those struggling to connect the dots, realize that at Cn-2 a horn is either blown or not. If a horn is blown at Cn-2, then that means a horn is blown at a cause before Cn. If a horn is not blown at Cn-2, then that means a horn is blown at Cn-1—in effect, at a cause before Cn.)
But now we land in contradiction. Since a horn is blown, a horn is blown at a specific cause. That cause, of course, can be described as Cn—Cn being, after all, any arbitrary moment. For reasons just explained, though, no horn is blown at Cn. So a horn is blown at Cn and yet no horn is blown at Cn. We land in such contradiction by supposing that the chain of causes recedes to infinity. The contradiction goes away if the chain has a first member. For in this case the angel at the first cause blows its horn and all the rest of them do not blow their horns.
Captain Howdy Paradox
Imagine that during the witching hour—from 3am to 4am—a demon (Pazuzu) does a palm dance to see if he is going to possess a little girl (Regan MacNeil): he is inside Regan if and only if his palms are forward at the end of the series; he is not inside Regan if and only if his palms are backward at the end of the series. At 3am his right hand is level with his chin and his left hand is down at his waist, both hands palm-forward. At 3:30am he switches to a palm-back position. At 3:45am he switches to palm-forward. He keeps switching at every halfway mark, flipping his hands instantaneously (as a deity could) such that the end of the dance cannot culminate in his palms being somewhere in-between being palm-forward or palm-backward.
Now, since there is a later moment where palms are backward for each moment where palms are forward, it is absurd to say that he is inside Regan at the end (4am). And since there is a later moment where palms are forward for each moment where palms are backward, it is also absurd to say that he is not inside Regan at the end. In the worst case, then, Pazuzu is somehow both inside Regan and not inside Regan at the same time and in the same respect: a contradiction. In the best case, the series simply does not decide the final state: whether Pazuzu is or is not inside Regan is not settled by progressing through the series.
Even though the best case avoids contradiction, it still admits that there cannot be a regress of causes for an effect. Think about it. Either a final state never comes about or a final state does come about. Now, if a final state never comes about, then that amounts to admitting that there cannot be an infinite regress of causes for an effect. If a final state does come about, then that amounts to admitting that there cannot be an infinite regress of causes for an effect. For assuming the best-case scenario (namely, that a final state is not settled by the series), a final state comes about only if that final state is either uncaused or caused by something independent of the preceding switches. Either way, however, the final state is not caused by the series.
Responses?
I have heard several responses to these paradoxes that attempt to vindicate the possibility of an actually infinite regress of causes for an effect. As a great admirer of Spinoza, someone who endorses the reality of infinite chains of causes receding back ad infinitum (never bottoming out), I myself search for ways out of these paradoxes.
Some approaches are quite radical, such as denying the principle of contradiction on which these paradoxes depend—perhaps adding, in what amounts to a sort of aesthetic reinforcement, that dialethias are an essential part of the beauty of the world. Less radical is what we might call the “Multiverse Defense,” versions of which I am more prone to hear.
According to the Multiverse Defense, which I will put in the language of the Angel Paradox, at every causal step there is a bifurcation of realities: in one universe, the angel at a certain cause blows its horn; in another universe, it refrains. There is no contradiction because every potential scenario where an angel might blow its horn is realized in some universe or another. In Universe A, an angel at Cn blows its horn. In Universe B, an angel at Cn-1 blows its horn, and so on. This continues across an infinite number of universes.
The problem with the Multiverse Defense is that it shifts the goalpost. Because causal chains are strictly intra-universal, meaning that a cause in universe A cannot bring about an effect in universe B, we can simply isolate a single universe for analysis. Let us limit our focus to universe A, for example. An angel at each cause in the infinite chain of causes in universe A will blow its horn if and only if no prior angel has blown its horn. But then for any given cause Cn, a horn must have been blown at some prior cause—which, of course, is itself describable as Cn. The Angel Paradox, given these boundaries, presents a stark challenge to causal infinitism within any given universe. The multiverse defense, as appealing as it might be to some, is effectively sidelined.
Another response might be that these scenarios rig the game against causal infinitism: that the contradiction is imposed by the conditional rule. The scenario supposes that every cause in an infinite chain depends on its predecessor. Each cause, in this case, has a prior cause, and each prior cause has a prior cause, without end—the buck of origination, so to say, always passed off to a prior cause. Nothing seems wrong with that in itself. Indeed, many philosophers (like Spinoza) look at things exactly that way. It is when the angel rule is added in that a problem appears. At best, then, what results in contradiction is not the infinite causal chain itself but rather the meshing of an infinite causal chain with the angel rule.
Here are some responses to this objection.
First, it is said that nothing seems wrong with having the causal buck always passed off to a prior cause. That is said too easily. At minimum it violates intuition. Think of an infinite chain of dominos. Like in the causal chain in question, where whatever one member is and does is completely a function of what the previous is and does, any one domino tips as a result of a previous domino tipping. How could the domino right in front of me tip if its tipping needs to be preceded by the consecutive tipping of an actually infinite number of antecedent dominos?
Or look at it this way. Imagine an infinite chain of things whose existence depends on what is prior. No member of the chain could exist in a scenario where every member depends on something else. No member could exist in a scenario where, in other words, the existence of each member is brought about by the existence of some other member that itself could bring about the existence of another member only once its own existence had been brought about by the existence of some other member (and so on). Imagine a chain of powerstrips. Each powerstrip passes along power only once it receives power, just as each mirror passes along light only once it receives light. But just as even an infinite chain of mirrors could not generate any light to begin with, even an infinite chain of powerstrips could not generate any power to begin with. A source of power in the case of the powerstrips, a source of light in the case of the mirrors, is required. The same goes for the existence of any member of the chain in question. What is required is something quite different from the dependent members of the chain. What is required is an absolutely nonderivative wellspring of existence-light-power. If the chain includes all that factors into how anything on the chain is (which is what we are supposing), then there must be something on the chain that is nonderivative. That which is nonderivative is either uncaused or self-caused. Could that uncaused or self-caused thing be at some intermediary point in the chain? No. That would mean the preceding causes did not fully cause the thing in question. But that is not what we are supposing. That uncaused or self-caused member, then, must be at the start.
The defender of causal finitism might also bring up the following point. To say that a causal series can be actually infinite presumes that there can be an actual infinity. But the notion of an actual infinity itself appears self-contradictory. On the one hand, an actual infinity is a completed infinity. On the other hand, the notion of infinity seems to be the notion of what is never completed—what is indefinitely large and may grow indefinitely but without bound. The notion of an actual infinity would be, therefore, the notion of a completed never-completed.
Of course, the infinitist can play the same game. One might just as well point out that the notion of an incomplete infinity appears self-contradictory. That which is incomplete is that which lacks. But that which is infinite is that which does not lack. And we can add to this the fact that infinitist thinkers support actual infinities with a variety of arguments. Russell argues that n, a finite number, cannot be the number of numbers since the number of numbers from 0 to n, inclusively, is always n + 1. Perhaps, so I can argue from what I know about Spinoza, when we see things from the standpoint of eternity, actual infinities appear more feasible. It might be insisted, in particular, that the infinite totality of ever-new iterations of thoughts and propositions and numbers are all always already there. Being that eternity is atemporality, it is inappropriate—so the infinitist might continue—to use the language of “ever- growing” to describe the infinite: the amount of names may grow, but not the things named. Just because humans climb to higher numbers successively does not mean the numbers themselves do.
But the bigger issue is this. The objection at hand is that imposing the Angel rule is what brings the problem, what generates the contradiction. That does not seem right. Consider a parallel in another area of philosophy. Many people have called utilitarianism into question by imagining stress-test scenarios where the consistent utilitarian must do something morally repugnant (like pull the trolley lever, or frame an innocent hobo in order to stop a race war). The objector seems to be saying, in parallel, that the problem is not with utilitarianism itself but with the conjunction of utilitarianism and these scenarios. The scenario is poisoning the well of utilitarianism. Utilitarianism, that is to say, would be just fine (totally consistent with giving us non-repugnant moral answers) were it not confronted with these strange scenarios involving people tied up to railroad tracks.
The defender of causal infinitism will likely push back on the analogy. But it is not as if, as far as I can tell, the Angel rule imposes any foreign logic onto the infinite causal chain itself. It is hard for me to see why it would be an unfair stress test. The Angel rule says, in essence, this action will happen given a certain way things are prior; the subsequent state is this if the previous state is that. But that is exactly how the whole chain runs: what happens at any point is a function of what happened before (which by transitivity implies, for whatever it might be worth to say, that what happens at any point is a function of everything that came before). No new strange conditions are being imposed. It simply reflects the machinery of the causal chain.
One might try to insist that there is a gap between “depends on prior states” and the specific Angel rule “blow if and only if no earlier angel blew.” The former is local whereas the latter is global. Whereas, in other words, any particular C on the chain sprouts from the previous, any particular angel on the chain must be sensitive to the entire infinite past. Upon consideration, however, any particular angel needs to know only whether a horn has sounded at its predecessor. The operation is local, member to predecessor, like any causal link. No angel needs to survey the entire line back to know what to do. It only needs to know what happened just before.
“We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”—Kafka (against the safe-space cancel culture pushed by anti-art bullies, left and right)
