Causation as opinion

 

You said:

We believe in causation: that is, that everything that happens has a cause, or to put it the negative way, nothing that happens can happen without a cause. This is an important aspect of the physics we acquire in childhood, a belief rather than an opinion, something we function with as a given. In our world, it does seem to be the case, but we can't prove it. All sorts of things happen that are mysteries to us. We assume they had a cause, but maybe they didn't. We do know, at least the scientists know, and we are wise to accept their long-held consensus, that at the atomic and subatomic level this is not quite the case. Given a single uranium atom, we know that at some point it will decay, but without discernable cause. It will just happen. We can't say it is random either because if we have a large collection of uranium atoms, we can predict very exactly how many will decay each second, just not which ones.

ChatGPT said:

You are pointing at a classic and still-lively philosophical tension. What you describe is close to the modern scientific view: most physicists would say that we have not abandoned causation, but rather refined what we mean by it.

In the case of radioactive decay, what we observe is not really “something happening without cause” but that the outcome is governed by probability rather than by a deterministically traceable trigger. The behavior of a single atom cannot be predicted in detail, but the statistical pattern across many atoms is remarkably stable. This is a core feature of modern quantum mechanics.

The famous interpretation associated with the early 20th century physicists working in Copenhagen (often called the Copenhagen interpretation) suggests that at microscopic scales nature may not have definite properties until measured. That idea unsettled many scientists, including Albert Einstein, who objected to the notion that “God plays dice.”

What is usually said today is that causation may be preserved if we shift from deterministic causation (“this event must follow that specific prior event”) to probabilistic causation (“this system’s structure constrains what is likely to happen”). In that sense, uranium decay is not considered acausal; it is just not individually predictable.

Philosophers still debate whether randomness is fundamental or whether deeper hidden variables exist. For everyday life and classical physics, causation works very well. At the quantum level, nature seems to speak in the language of chance wrapped inside strong statistical order.

If you like, I can also talk about how this idea connects to free will, to biology, or to the older philosophical arguments about causation.

Is this conversation helpful so far?