 An analogy may help. Suppose Anne has no sugar, and needs some. She can borrow a bag of sugar from Breanna. Now Anne has a bag of sugar. Where did it come from? Easy—it came from Breanna, who is now a bag of sugar down. But suppose Breanna borrowed a bag of sugar from Craig in order to then pass it on to Anne. Where did Anne’s bag of sugar come from then? Ultimately, from Craig, who ends up a bag of sugar down. But suppose Craig borrowed a bag of sugar from Devi … and so on, ad infinitum. Then where did the bag of sugar come from? At the end of the infinite sequence, Anne is one bag of sugar up, and nobody is a bag of sugar down, for everyone after Anne simply borrowed a bag of sugar, and then passed it on to the next person in the chain. There’s an extra bag of sugar in the system that seems to have appeared as if by magic. If there is a finite sequence of borrowers, however long, then the last person in the chain ends up a bag of sugar down, so that’s where the bag of sugar that ends up with Anne ultimately comes from. But if the chain never ends, Anne ends up with a bag of sugar that doesn’t seem to have come from anybody, as nobody has lost any bags of sugar—they all just borrowed it to pass it on. The infinite regress seems to create sugar from nowhere: pleasant, perhaps, but metaphysically suspicious all the same.