No way? No way!
In the previous post, I said that something happens mechanistically if, and only if, it unfolds in some fully specific way. Otherwise it happens by magic. Here I argue that everything happens mechanistically, nothing magically.
I assume that the universe is intelligible: even if limited beings like us can’t make complete sense of it, an infinite intellect could. The universe is intelligible only if every event happens in some fully specific way; otherwise not even an infinite intellect could fully understand how it happened. Events include the things we do purposely, such as my writing this post. In an intelligible universe, my purposes in writing it must arise from fully specific mechanisms: neural, molecular, atomic, subatomic, and so on without end.
Some deny that last claim. Dustin Crummett writes as follows: “Plausibly, there are no mechanisms at the level of the fundamental particles; they just do their thing. So, ultimately all physical processes rest on events which are such that there is no way they come about.”
But if particles “just do their thing,” what is their thing? Is it the same thing each time? If not, how does it differ from one occasion to another? If humans never asked how items in the world do their thing, science wouldn’t exist. As for “fundamental” particles, the history of science can be read as the story of discovering, again and again, that the things we had thought were fundamental turned out not to be.
To put my conclusion as a slogan: If there’s no way it happened, then there’s no way it happened. My argument assumes that the universe is intelligible. I leave the question “Why assume it is?” for a future post.
