>>11482045>*blocks you're path*The reason that physics cannot pay explanatory debts generated by various causal hypotheses is that it does not itself possess an adequate understanding of causality. This is evident from the fact that in physics, events are assumed to be either deterministic or nondeterministic in origin. Given an object, event, set or process, it is usually assumed to have come about in one of just two possible ways: either it was brought about by something prior and external to it, or it sprang forth spontaneously as if by magic. The prevalence of this dichotomy, determinacy versus randomness, amounts to an unspoken scientific axiom asserting that everything in the universe is ultimately either a function of causes external to the determined entity (up to and including the universe itself), or no function of anything whatsoever. In the former case there is a known or unknown explanation, albeit external; in the latter case, there is no explanation at all. In neither case can the universe be regarded as causally self-contained.
In a self-deterministic system, causal regression leads to a completely intrinsic self-generative process. In any system that is not ultimately self-deterministic, including any system that is either random or deterministic in the standard extrinsic sense, causal regression terminates at null causality or does not terminate. In either of the latter two cases, science can fully explain nothing; in the absence of a final cause, even material and efficient causes are subject to causal regression toward ever more basic (prior and embedding) substances and processes, or if random in origin, toward primitive acausality. So given that explanation is largely what science is all about, science would seem to have no choice but to treat the universe as a self-deterministic, causally self-contained system.
