On May 6, 10:25 pm, Dave Smith  wrote:
> On 5 May, 05:27, Peter Brooks  wrote:
>
> > How can an event be independent of all other events though?
>
> I tend to assume that every event has a cause, whether or not I know
> what the cause is.  However, I don't see how such an assumption could
> be proved.
>
I think that you're right, it isn't really a matter for proof.

However, the very point that started this thread is that, if you
observe a regularity in some behaviour, then it is difficult to see
how there cannot be a cause. Of course the regularity might be a
coincidence - and we're good at spotting those - so just one
regularity doesn't establish the matter.

If, though, you can conduct repeatable experiments that show that in
situation X, you get a constant result Y, as in, if you observe the
radiation from a sample of Uranium 235, you'll find that it has a half-
life of 704 million years, then there must be something about the
atoms that 'knows' when to decay. Otherwise, if it was a random event
(that it each atom decayed utterly spontaneously, based on no history
- in other words had no cause) then two lumps of U235 would be
expected to show different half-lives. This would render the measuring
of half-lives a non-repeatable event.

Even I have managed, successfully, to measure the half life of various
substances within ranges of reasonable experimental error, so they do,
in my view, have a very clear reality.

So I'd say, rather than it being a matter of 'proof' that things have
causes, it is a matter for a sceptic to find something that doesn't.
If there is something, then that's interesting. I think it would be
reasonable to say that things in another universe would have to have
separate causes from things in this universe - that's really what it
means to be a different universe, to have a separate physical
existence or, in other words, a separate causal chain. You couldn't,
because of this, measure things there, so that makes it rather less
interesting as a practically demonstrable phenomenon.

We might be falsely inclined to this view by special circumstances of
where we are - evolution, for example, is a powerful case of very long
observable causal chains. The trouble is that even things observed at
the limits of our ability to observe appear (like radioactivity) to
have causes too.