Date: August 10th, 2026 10:21 AM Author: ivory mood
Who the hell questions causal closure of the physical? No serious thinker or physicist. It's the default assumption in terms of philosophical and scientific consensus. Every rigorously tested physical effect has been fully accounted for by prior physical states and laws. Non-physical causes would produce detectable anomalies or residual variances once all physical variables are controlled. There are none observed. It's the principle that survives contact with experiment and underwrites the predictive success of science. It remains revisable if clean counter-evidence ever arrives, although that is extraordinarily unlikely.
Date: August 10th, 2026 10:28 AM Author: ivory mood
I'm overclaiming somewhat by saying no serious thinkers. There are serious papers written by interactionist dualists and whoever else. Lots of positions are “serious” inside philosophy departments while remaining wildly implausible given the scientific record. Non-physical causation that actually *does* anything is tightly constrained by known physics.
Date: August 10th, 2026 10:45 AM Author: ivory mood
It's a defeasible claim that can always be revised in the face of new evidence. Empirical evidence normally gives inductive support rather than metaphysical certainty. Paradigms change, but that establishes only a possibility of error. As of now, there is no well-established physical phenomenon for which introducing a nonphysical causal influence is required by the evidence. And this case is not really one that resembles historical failures considering that increasingly successful physical explanations have repeatedly eliminated proposed extra causal agencies.