🚀 go-pugleaf

I see that I need to say a little bit more.

If "The universe is causally closed" is a scientifically meaningful
hypothesis, then it must be falsifiable.  But what sort of observation
could possibly falsify it?

I claim that given any observation whatsoever, however out-of-nowhere
it appears, a scientifically minded observer would assume it had a
cause (modulo the apparent indeterminacy of quantum mechanics).  So no
observation could possibly falsify the hypothesis.

This reasoning, by the way, is pretty much straight out of Hume,
especially the essay on Miracles.

In the same thread, Dave Chalmers writes:

   > 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. 

I don't agree.  If you read old journal articles, you find many cases
where different people performed apparently the same experiment and
got different results.  In quite a number of these cases the
discrepancies are simply never explained, in spite of a great deal of
effort.  In the end one theory wins out, and the discrepant
experiments are simply forgotten.  Most scientists believe (and I am
one of them) that if we only knew *enough* we would be able to account
for the differences, but this is really a matter of faith.

	-- Bill