Radioactive decay and causation

Not a single word in your long quotations refutes, or even addresses, my objections. I take it that either you don’t understand my objections, or did not read them carefully enough. Try reading more slowly and digesting my argument step by step, before digging around the internet for scattershot quotations in order to shoot it down.

Now you are contradicting yourself. You have just said that the phenomenon in question (the timing of a particular radioactive emission) is “uncaused”, whereas previously you argued that the cause of the emission at that particular time was caused by probability. My point was that probability, as such, doesn’t cause anything at all.

I was not undertaking to refute the argument that some quantum events are “uncaused.” I was undertaking only to refute your statements to the effect that the cause of the timing of a particular emission was “probability.” In fact, on your principles, there is no cause at all for the timing of the particular emission, so that is what you should say, not that the cause was probability. Saying that the cause was probability just muddies the intellectual waters.

1 Like