What are peoples' views here about the concept of causation? Despite the idea of causation being something that modern physicists consider to be most likely emergent and generally not very applicable to questions of "fundamental" reality, I still see it widely used by philosophers, especially Aristotelians and theologians, to argue for some sort of metaphysical realm, or "sufficient reason for reality", or divine agent, etc etc.
It's my view that many classic philosophical questions spring from a misunderstanding of what causation and contingency are. The question of why the laws of nature are what they are, or why the universe exists, or how we might explain a potential infinite regress of contingent things seems to hinge on the idea that the structure of causation is prior to all other things and provides a context within which all other things operate. This doesn't make much sense to me, since when we're talking about fundamental reality- everything that exists- whatever structure or property we call "causation" would be contained within that description, and thus wouldn't be something that acts upon it.
In another way of speaking- when we're trying to describe or explain all of reality, we couldn't explain reality in terms of causation- we would explain causation in terms of reality. Thoughts on this?