Causation and Laws of Nature

Abstract

AbstractI define the key terms of the Causal Principle, namely ‘whatever’, ‘begins to exist’, and ‘cause’, and the related terms ‘time’, ‘eternal’, ‘event’, ‘change’, ‘perdurantism’, and ‘uncaused’. In particular, something has a beginning if it has a temporal extension, the extension is finite, and it has temporal edges/boundaries, that is, it does not have a static closed loop or a changeless/timeless phase that avoids an edge. This definition is compatible with both dynamic and static theories of time. While causal eliminativists and causal reductionists have claimed that causation has no basis in fundamental physics others have replied that fundamental physics does not provide a complete description of reality, and that it does not exclude causation and causal properties which operate at a more fundamental level as the ground of the regularities described by fundamental physics (Weaver, Fundamental Causation: Physics, Metaphysics, and the Deep Structure of the World. London: Routledge, 2019). Quantum physics has not shown that the Causal Principle is violated given that (1) quantum particles emerge from the quantum vacuum which is not non-being but something with vacuum fields, (2) radioactive disintegration of atomic nuclei exhibit statistical regularities that strongly indicate the existence of more fundamental ordered causes, and (3) many different interpretations of quantum physics exist, and some are perfectly deterministic.