Thursday, March 11, 2021

The Kit Kat Problem

Today, we take a break from political philosophy to do some metaphysics. 

According to the manufacturer, the filling in-between the cookie layers in Kit Kats is composed of ground up Kit Kats, among other things

But of course this creates an infinite regress. After all, any Kit Kat presupposes the existence of a prior Kit Kat to form its filling. But this means there can be no first Kit Kat.

No, you can't say that the first Kit Kat lacked the same filling. After all, what it is to be a Kit Kat is to be filled with ground Kit Kat. So, if the first Kit Kat lacked that filling, it was not a Kit Kat. And if this pseudo-kit Kat Kat was ground up to form the filling of the second Kit Kat, well, the second Kit Kat was also not a real Kit Kat, since it was filled with pseudo-Kit Kat rather than actual Kit Kat. A genuine Kit Kat is filled with other Kit Kats. 

Thus, there are only two possibilities: Either Kit Kats are not real (there are no genuine Kit Kats, only fakes) or there is an infinite regress of Kit Kats extending backward into eternity, with there being no beginning of time. Time extends backward infinitely. (I assume that Kit Kats take a discrete, finite amount of time to produce.) Either Kit Kats are an illusion or Kit Kats have always been around.

But here is one Kit Kat and here is another. Accordingly, skepticism about Kit Kats seems less plausible than an eternal chain of Kit Kats.