🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <BILL.92Sep11162437@ca3.nsma.arizona.edu> bill@nsma.arizona.edu (Bill Skaggs) writes:

>I've heard this said before, but I don't understand it.  If "The
>physical world is causally closed" is a scientifically meaningful
>hypothesis, then it must be falsifiable, and presumably the kind of
>thing that would falsify it would be an uncaused event -- an event
>that happens for no physical reason.  But life is full of apparently
>uncaused events; they may even be the majority.  So there is actually
>a great deal of evidence against the hypothesis.  We simply ignore
>this evidence, either because of a faith that the universe is lawful
>in spite of appearances, or because we are forced to assume lawfulness
>in order to do science.

So what are all these uncaused events?  Certainly there are some events
with no apparent cause, but it seems to usually turn out that when
we dig deep enough there's a cause there.  Macroscpoic events seem
to be constituted of lots of microscopic events, and one doesn't see
very many uncaused microscopic events (with the exception of the
results of quantum measurements, but the latter don't leave much room
for a substantial dualism to have much causal oomph.  See Eccles for
a contrary opinion, however).  The evidence from physics so far seems
to be that modulo the indeterminacy of quantum measurement, the
microscopic world is deterministic.  Of course, that conclusion is
highly defeasible, but I don't think it's likely to be defeated in
a way that's will leave substantial enough gaps for a disembodied
mind to do much interesting causal work.

-- 
Dave Chalmers                            (dave@cogsci.indiana.edu)      
Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, Indiana University.
"It is not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable."