Classical Theism, Philosophy, and Religion Forum

You are not logged in. Would you like to login or register?



4/11/2018 11:33 am  #1


Causality

Imagine a red ball that had 3 specific final causes - to turn things it hits into flowers, to turn things it hits into water, and to simply shove things it hits like all other red balls.

This set of 3 potential results constitute the final cause of the red ball. Now, suppose the red ball produces these results completely randomly, such that there is no unique uniform pattern that can predict what result out of these 3 it will produce next.   Now, imagine instead that the red ball was not only random and indeterminate with regards to producing the 3 results above, but was positively brute.   Imagine, then, the red ball producing the effect of shoving things like all other red balls all of the time; that the other 2 potential results fail to occur for no reason, that it is just random luck that the red ball produces the same result out of 3 possible ones again and again and again.       This would completely undermine our expectation that the ball will produce the same result it has been producing in the past. We would no longer be justified in expecting the ball to shove things again if it hits something, but have to take just as seriously the possibility it will do the other 2 things as well, no matter how many times the ball repeats the same old action. 

The reason why I wrote this very thread then is to ask the important question: Is the ontological indeterminacy of hydrogen atom decay in QM an example of brute regularity? That is, are the various temporal options at which the atom could decay examples of acceptable ontological randomness that isn't brute (and thus isn't without objective probability whatsoever - as brute facts by their very definition are), or do those who support the Copenhagen interpretation expect us to take seriously the idea that the decay at any point in time whatsoever is random in the unintelligible-irrational-brute-fact sense of randomness?

 

4/11/2018 3:55 pm  #2


Re: Causality

Check out the quantum Thomist blog (I know this is such a cop out responce!)

 

Board footera

 

Powered by Boardhost. Create a Free Forum