RE: The Principle of Contingent Causation: The Impossibility of Infinite Regress.
July 5, 2023 at 9:24 pm
(This post was last modified: July 5, 2023 at 9:26 pm by Belacqua.)
(July 5, 2023 at 1:53 pm)polymath257 Wrote:(July 5, 2023 at 9:56 am)Belacqua Wrote: I'm curious why you thought you needed to tell me this.
What have I said which indicates that I don't understand it, or believe otherwise?
Did you continue to read on? The point is that natural laws (for example, of causation) are an underpinning of the notion of dependence.
Put another way, what does the concept of dependence (and thereby the notion of contingency) depend upon?
Nobody's challenging any natural laws, as far as I know.
I agree that "dependence" is probably clearer for modern people than Aristotle's term translated as "cause." The traditional English would be "X is caused by A, B, and C." But you're right that "X depends for its continued existence on A, B, and C" would be closer to the meaning for modern people.
What does the concept of dependence depend on? You mean the idea of it in my brain? I guess it depends on 1) my observation that things depend on other things, and 2) the many people who have written about dependency in the world. That's how the concept got into my mind.
An essential series of causation, or of dependency, certainly isn't any sort of magical thing.
