Eliminative Determinism* is a new theory of causation. It is a natural corollary of the theory of eliminative materialism and its challenge to folk psychology. Rather than  present itself merely as an innovation or intertheoretic version of traditional determinism, it seeks to offer itself as a replacement,  or at least as an alternative, for the present generally accepted school of thought.

It is based upon principles of parsimony and simplicity. It does not pretend to amend or eliminate the core determinist bottom-line doctrine that the algorithms of causal consistency in human behaviour are the inevitable result of antecedent conditions and that the human being, in acts of apparent choice, is the ineluctable expression of his or her heredity and past environment.

                ELIMINATIVE DETERMINISM'S MOST BASIC CONCEPT.

My most basic concept of what I call eliminative determinism holds that the philosophical tradition of characterising individual events as the result of a regularising causation (cause and effect) reflects our human-centred preoccupation with the unpredictable vagaries of the constantly changing universe.  Thus it is that we attribute an authoritarian, law-applying agential order, such as God or The Laws of Nature in an effort to combat our vague suspicions of finding ourselves cast into a chaotic universe.   The belief in such a theological or cosmic ascendancy provides an assurance that someone or something is in control.  Such faith or belief bestows relief.   The surety of an authority-concept frees us from ontological ignorance and doubt.  There is a lessening of the angst and dreaded uncertainty, which the thought of a cold, lawless, incomprehensible chaotic universe engenders. 

I argue that  'that which causes' equals 'that which exists' and 'that which exists' equates to that which is holistically cosmically present.  The fact that nothing does not exist demonstrates that the existence of nothing or nothingness (or a vacuum) is a cosmo-physical impossibility.  Nobody has ever provided evidence that nothing either exists or does not exist.  Therefore there must be something rather than nothing.  Both something and nothing cannot not exist nor not not exist.   A none - thing is an instantational impossibility which neither exists as a thing nor as a none-thing.  A none–thing is not even the nominatum of the referent none-thing.   Such is the immensity and complexity of the cosmos; such is the universal ubiquity of modal change, and such is the homogeny between 'changing entities,' all of which are governed by the curtailment of the existential imperative, which, driven by that which is possible, peremptorily determines that  'to exist' is analogous 'to cause.

So in answer to the question:

Why does  billiard ball [a] move billiard ball [b] when it strikes it?

The answer is;

                             Because they both exist that way.

My claim that that which is epistemically possible is manifested in the physical concrecity of the possible as manifested in the reality objects to be found in the cosmos.  Such epistemically verifiable  possibilia  is also a subjunctive or alethic attainability in that  my claim must essentially be true.  If my claim were to be untrue, then the cosmos would consist of impossible entities which were impossible to incorporate as elements of any covering or natural law.  As that which is epistemically proved valid by the  realisation of its own physical manifestation (i.e. including our autopoietic selves, who can only procreate possible rather than impossible offspring, surrounded as we are by the other physically possible objects to be found in the cosmos) that means that  the reality of the cosmos equals the possible objects of which it consists and constitute the self-governed immensity regulated by the very products of material existential possibility – the ever-changing holon itself.

What we humans interpret as causality is actually our local observation and experience of the only way that the cosmos can exist nomonologically circumscribed as it is by the engendered inevitability and physical possibility of its own presence.

For humans to seek to single out attribute individual 'cause' to any causal object is to differentiate and isolate that object as being an individually culpable entity which is somehow antithetically separated from the overall, shared, mutual or 'joint causal responsibility' or 'catenulate accountability' of all the causal objects in the cosmos both historical and contemporary that exist in accordance with scientific generalization based on empirical observations or Laws of Nature or hypotheses confirmed by scientific experiments.
     Reflective judgment can take up the slack to what is left unattended to by this new ontology.

Now the confrontation twixt old and new extends into the cobwebby domain of folk ontology and the Gothic seigneury of causality and free will and the psycho-myth of 'events.'