Sunday, May 20, 2012 Oerter contra the principle of causality
The Scholastic principle of causality states that any potential,
if actualized, must be actualized by something already actual.
(It is also sometimes formulated as the thesis that whatever is
moved is moved by another or whatever is changed is changed by
another. But the more technical way of stating it is less
potentially misleading for readers unacquainted with Scholastic
thinking, who are bound to read things into terms like “motion”
or “change” that Scholastic writers do not intend.) In an
earlier post I responded to an objection to the principle raised
by physicist Robert Oerter, who has, at his blog, been writing
up a series of critical posts on my book The Last Superstition.
Oerter has now posted two further installments in his series,
which develop and defend his criticism of the principle of
causality. Let’s take a look. Quantum mechanics and causality
Recall that in an earlier post Oerter claimed that quantum
mechanics casts doubt on the