Necessary Thing

[robvalue]

I've been thinking about this more, and I might now understand why I am confused.

I think that this "depends upon" or "contingent" language is being used in such a way that A is contingent on B if A makes up a part of B. So that B as a whole will not "exist", if one of its parts ceases to exist.

I find this rather strange, if this is the case. It's a complete tautology. If something is made up of parts, then if any of the parts are missing, then not all the parts are there. What are we even investigating?

I was approaching the problem with less assumptions. I was taking it to mean that the existence of entity A is contingent upon the existence of entity B if the sudden non-existence of B would cause the non-existence of A. I wasn't making any further implications as to how this is actually caused; just that it is cause and effect.

If the problem is in fact only referring to the tautological version of "contingent", then the question simply becomes whether there's some sort of infinite regression of things piled on top of other things. So the bits of the helium atom or whatever are piled onto the rest of the atom, then the atom is piled onto the fabric of reality say; so that if reality ceased to exist there would be no place for the atom to exist in. (Or we could say "reality and everything in it" is contingent upon any of the things in the reality... you see what I mean about a tautology. You could of course use a bunch of other groupings first, such as the object containing the helium atom; and then the solar system containing the object... and so on. However you want to do it. Identifying groups of entities is entirely arbitrary.)

Is reality piled onto something else? Maybe another reality of some sort. And maybe that one is piled on another, and so on. I see no logical problem with an infinite regression of piled up realities. Trying to extrapolate information about how realities themselves would interact based on the contents of a reality is the fallacy of composition. Since we have no information about how realities interact, we can't rule out any logically consistent framework. The group of "reality 1 upon reality 2" is then contingent upon "reality 1"; and so on iteratively. If we're only interested in "what is demonstrably real" then we are (currently) confining our problem to this reality alone and not any other possible existent entities.

If we're restricting ourselves entirely to this reality, and calling reality itself an entity, then this reality would appear to necessarily be the final stop (along with its contents, if you like). But if we did use my more abstract definition of contingency, then it could be circular with no final stop.