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sakranut comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012) - Less Wrong
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I was referring to the dispute in the 17th and 18th centuries with Hume, Berkeley, and Locke on the empiricist side, and Descartes, Leibnitz, and Spinoza, on the rationalist Side, as described in this paper.
Out of curiosity, what is the connection between atoms and causality?
Enlightening! Thank you for the paper.
Sorry, it was Einstein's theory of special relativity that resolved Hume's insight, not atomic theory. Basically, Hume argued that if you see a ball X hit a ball Y, and subsequently ball Y begins rolling at the same speed of ball X, all one has really experienced is the perception of ball X moving next to ball Y and the subsequent spontaneous acceleration of ball Y. Infinity out of infinity times you may experience the exact same perception whenever ball X bumps into ball Y, but in Hume's time there was no empirical way to prove that the collision of ball X into ball Y caused the effect of the latter's acceleration. With this, you can. I'm afraid I can't answer in any more depth than that, as I myself don't understand the mathematics behind it. Anyone else?