I was recently watching a video that Joe Schmid posted on his ‘Majesty of Reason’ channel (great channel by the way), and he mentioned a term that I hadn’t heard before in relation to the apparent absence of causality in quantum mechanics. Namely, he said that maybe there is causation, but it’s indeterministic causation.

Now, I admit, I find that label to be very oxymoronic, and I hadn’t heard the term until Joe mentioned it. To me, it doesn’t really make sense to say that an event has a cause even though nothing is sufficient to ensure that the event would occur — it is genuinely probabilistic. Even in absolutely identical situations, it will not always occur.

This may be more a disagreement over semantics than anything else, but does it really make sense to call that situation ‘causal’ in any meaningful sense? I would be more inclined to simply call it acausal. But I’m by no means an expert in these subjects.