 Even if we rule out modal dependence,  (AI)  is a very strong sense of fundamentality, probably much too strong. Accordingly, it may not be a very popular option. Indeed, it is difficult to find a direct endorsement of (AI) in the literature. That being said, there are some potential if controversial candidates for absolutely independent entities, such as God. Perhaps it is also possible to think of the universe as a whole as absolutely independent in this sense. This might reflect something like Georges Lemaître’s theory of the “primeval atom” or the “Cosmic Egg” hypothesis—an idea now better known as the Big Bang theory. Lemaître’s hypothesis was that the observed expansion of the universe may have started from a single point, the primeval atom, which would have contained the entire mass of the universe. Now, one may of course postulate that the primeval atom itself could depend on something else, such as God, but this nevertheless gives us an entirely naturalistically motivated idea of absolute independence. The metaphysical position that comes closest to this idea would be a type of monism, perhaps motivated by considerations emerging from quantum holism (Calosi 2013; Ney 2015; Ismael &amp; Schaffer forthcoming; and the entry on  monism).