9.1 Philosophical aspects on causality
The concept of causality has a long history in philosophy, see for instance Aalen, Borgan, and Gjessing (2008) for a concise review. A fundamental question, with a possibly unexpected answer, is “Does everything that happens have a cause?”. According to Zeilinger (2005), the answer is “No”.
“The discovery that individual events are irreducibly random is probably one of the most significant findings of the twentieth century. Before this, one could find comfort in the assumption that random events only seem random because of our ignorance … But for the individual event in quantum physics, not only do we not know the cause, there is no cause.”
Of course, this statement must not necessarily be taken literally, but it indicates that nothing is to be taken as granted.
References
Aalen, O. O., Ø. Borgan, and H. K. Gjessing. 2008. Survival and Event History Analysis: A Process Point of View. New York: Springer.
Zeilinger, A. 2005. “The Message of the Quantum.” Nature 438: 743.