The immensity and complexity of the material cosmos; the universal ubiquity of modal change, and the homogeny between 'change' and 'cause,' is universally governed by the existential imperative which peremptorily determines that 'to exist' is analogous 'to cause.'
To name something is not to existentialise it, nor does the act of thinking about something instantiate the ideation as a quasi-object.
Thefore to name change as The Existential Imperative is not to claim that such a thing actually exists or is in any way tangible, and unlike the use of words like Nature, or the Laws of Nature, or God, it simply refers to the automaticity of causal objects that exist in the only way that they can exist due to their impingemental and impinged upon existential status as causal objects
For humans to seek and to single out attribute an 'individual cause' to any causal/eventive object or objects is to wrongfully differentiate and isolate that object as being an individually unnatural 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. To attribute complete blame or responsibility to any process or social force that binds an individual to the courses of action demanded by that force, or an action or effect initiated by a human causal object or otherwise - is to decend to the level of illogical occultism.
The five propositions of Eliminative Determinism infer that whilst we genuinely YEARN for the fiction of freedom of action to be a fact, it is for egotistical reasons that we are reluctant to change this view. We have spent x-years forging our own personality, making sacrifices, making mistakes, behaving foolishly, learning lessons, reading this, reading that, feeling this, feeling that - getting hurt and feeling better. Thus we conclude that we have graduated experientially to a stage where we have learned to make genuine choices and can resist or ignore the antecedal influences which moulded us and to which we are deterministically prone.
It would come as a terrific blow to our confidence if, when driving our car and approaching our destination, someone suddenly claimed that we were never in control of the wheel at any time during our lourney and we were actually under the control of an neuro-physiological automatic pilot called catenulate culmination (past events.) Many people's egotisms would be outraged to be told that furthermore, they have been wagged at the end of a long causal chain all these years without being aware of the fact.
My garden robin in the Spring was rapturous with glee, and followed me with wistful wing from pear to apple tree;
His melodies the summer long, he carolled with delight, as if he could with jewelled song, find favour in my sight. 
[Robert William Service]
The lovely robin is the National Bird of Britain. We chose the European Robin [Erithacus rubecula] as our national bird in the 1960s. The bird is lovely, has a beautiful singing voice, and is very protective over its territory. We have some robins who live near our home.
I would suggest that although the robin with its rapid head-movement, cocking its head from side to side [is this the origin of the term 'cock robin?] to focus its bright eye on the available twigs for nest-building, it is not making a 'choice,' but only appears to be.
To describe the robin's discriminatory behaviour concerning which twig to select for its nestbuilding as 'choice' is perfectly sensible. Such data will not cause any inventoriable conflicts in a human brain which has been programmed since infancy to accept 'choice' as a viable behavioural category. There will be no communicational problems either, for when he tells a friend that he saw a robin choosing a particular twig from amongst those available. His friend's brain has also been programmed to categorise the information in a similar way.
Purely en passant, and because deterministically intrusive errant thoughts are often so difficult to capture and recall if passed by - I 
wonder if we were to accept the notion of 'choice' as being true, how far down the ladder of sentience one must clamber before one reaches the level of non-sentience, or non-choice? For example, if we agreed that a robin WAS capable of 'choice' - could the same be said of an earthworm or a bumble-bee or a common cold virus?
This means [if you accept the eliminative deterministic view] that the concept: 'choice' = 'appears to be making a choice.'
Now as it is obviously important for humans to internalise what they see in order that the brain may mediate and store such data concerning the individual's environment. In order to communicate our experiences to others, we require a form of words to describe the robin's actions [or in eliminativist terms: 'the existential modality of the robin during the period of its observation of a twig-array.]
Most people do not think this way, not because they are unintelligent, on the contrary many of them are much more intelligent in certain ways, but because they have other interests and concerns.
In a philo-ontological questioning such as we are engaged in here however, the robin's activity can be recorded by the observant human brain, inventorially stored and communicated or presented in two different ways:
(1) That of a robin choosing a twig from amongst many.
(2) That of a robin enacting an imprinted, instinctively guided, reflexive process.
In that sense any description of the robin's behaviour would be contextual. What do I mean by this? I mean that if for example I was reading such a poem as the one about the robin above by Robert William Service of Eskimo Nell fame, I would need to deliberately suppress or suspend my belief in order to enjoy the personification which implies that the robin 'was rapturous with glee,' or had a 'sad wing,' or if his singing was performed in order to find favour in the eyes of his human observer.
If on the other hand I was observing the small creature with the light horny waterproof structure forming the external covering with a red patch on the breast we call a robin dispassionately, scientifically, then I would view the behaviour quite differently.
I would conclude that he was actually a befeathered little automaton, acting out deterministically imprinted instructions. which had been laid down over millennia by a process of genealogical catenulation scripted in deoxyribonucleic acid economically packaged for deterministic delivery in the form of a behavioural fortune cookie wrapped in a double helix.
The Deterministic DNA contains the genetic instructions specifying the biological development of all cellular forms of life, including which size, smell and colour of twigs have proved to be the most suitable survival-wise for his particular subspecies of subphylum vertebrata over the last million years. [or whatever.]
This then is the contextual distinction or dichotomy I am highlighting when I refer to the practical, commonsensical apprehension of 'events' and our description of them employing the traditional usage, and the alternative deterministic scientific Laplacian account as a series of concatenational effects, rather like a line of dominoes falling from a spatio-temporal point (A) when the first domino falls - to the spatio-temporal point (B) when the last domino falls.
For Eliminative Determinism there is no abstract 'cause' and 'effect' involved - just the causal dominoes and the eventive dominoes. There is no 'event' either - the notion: 'event' really can be mapped to: 'there exists more than one contiguous domino.'
It makes no SCIENTIFIC sense to speak scientifically, pragmatically or materialistically of
'freedoms' - though it does make non-scientific, romantic or 'everyday life' sense to speak in such terms - because - and here we encounter the raison d'être for such abstractions as 'freedom' [indeed or ANY abstraction] - the word 'freedom' is a useful fiction.
The word 'freedom' is useful in order to avoid the intimidatingly long paraphrasis required to provide the actual 'scientific' version, which is the 'realistic' version of the robin's 'choice.
It is necessary to provide us humans with some semblance of meaningfulness in our lives. We need a level of empathy towards ourselves and other humans/creatures/landscapes/music/art/ literature/poetry etc., from the point of view of what I will call for convenience - our transcendental inner life.
I do not believe in a 'self' on the discrete or the unitary model. I believe that a selfish human holism exists, and as far as the "seat of selfishness" is concerned [notice the "scare quotes" - I believe that it is an existential modality of the meat inside our skulls. It seems to me, and here I am going to employ the computer as a metaphor, that the working brain is organised in a fashion where there is some sort of 'control centre' which co-ordinates the incoming and outgoing date and
structures the behaviour patterns which it feels are most beneficial to the human organism. There seems no philosophical or physiological reason why this should be not so - for like every other creature on the planet the brain coordinates/controls the limbs, facial expressions, balance, and all the rest of it, so why should it not control and co-ordinate its own functioning?
Maybe the idea of ‘most beneficial’ suggests that there exists some kind of benefit-meter in the cortex that weighs its choices and picks one that is the best for survival, redolent of an 'intelligent organisation of resources?' I do think that the brain records and stores data in such a way that it 'learns' lessons. Child psychologists would certainly be able to provide scientific evidence for this as regards to the developing child, but one has only got to look at say a feral child to see that in the absence of humans its brain records and stores data in such a way that it 'learns' lessons which enable repeat modes of self protection, food-gathering expertise and survivalist stratagems within the lupine jungle world in which it exists. I imagine that normally we learn to experience what is best for us by a process of parental guidance, pleasant or unpleasant experience, and hardwired instinct?
In this way then we accumulate and gather information that provides us with 'viable working data' or 'experiential evidence,' which provides an existential framework within which the deterministically produced holism can work out our concatenationally determined destiny. In that sense, yes, I do believe that there exists some kind of best-policy-meter somewhere in the brain that weighs its choices and picks one that is the best for survival and that this 'best-policy-meter' is written determino-genetically and coded in deoxyribonucleic acid.
Of course this survivalist 'best-policy-meter' - better known as 'commonsense' can be damaged and 'overidden' due to the effects of chemicals like alcohol, narcotics, tobacco, sugar, chocolate, etc., and also by errant brain-states such as an appetite for speed, sex, danger, theft, over-emotionalism and all the rest of it.
Omar Khayaam pushed the policy of self-indulgence - the hedonistic approach that 'most beneficial’ should be replaced with; ‘most pleasurable.’- hence the flasks of wine [I cannot believe there was only one and the women.
If one adds the complexities due to *chance * -- i. e. the apparent probabilistic nature of the process at the lowest level of analysis – it is impossible to imagine any degree of predictability other than that of guesswork based upon past experience.
If someone were to refer to 'behavioral predictability' in relation to determinism and the inevitability of 'events' then I do not believe it is part of the deterministic belief or project. There was one famous Frenchman Laplace, who said stuff most apposite to my paper in the Introduction to his Essai philosophique sur les probabilités (1814) His importance with regard to determinism came up in a lecture given by my favourite tutor Dr. Vernon Pratt [a brilliant mind] He is a fellow determinist/eliminative materialist.
Look at this from a Laplacian website:
' So not only did Laplace make important discoveries, but he also thought it crucial to communicate them to a wide audience so that even those not versed in technical mathematics could share his pleasure and enthusiasm for science. This desire gave rise to verbal paraphrases of his two great treatises as Exposition du Système du Monde and the Essai Philosophique sur les Probabilités. Consider what he had to say in the latter work:
All events, even those that on account of their insignificance do not seem to follow the great laws of nature, are a result of it just as necessarily as the revolutions of the sun. In ignorance of the ties which unite such events to the entire system of the universe, they have been made to depend upon final causes or upon hazard, according as they occur and are repeated with regularity, or appear without regard to order; but these imaginary causes have gradually receded with the widening bounds of knowledge and disappear entirely before sound philosophy, which sees in them only the expression of our ignorance of the true causes. Present events are connected with preceding ones by a tie based upon the evident principle that a thing cannot occur without a cause that produces it... The theory of chance consists in reducing all the events of the same kind to a certain number of cases equally possible, that is to say, to such as we may be equally undecided about in regard to their existence, and in determining the number of cases favourable to the event whose probability is sought. The ratio of this number to that of all the cases possible is the measure of this probability, which is thus simply a fraction whose numerator is the number of favourable cases and whose denominator is the number of all cases possible... The theory of probabilities is at bottom only common sense reduced to calculus; it makes us appreciate with exactitude that which exact minds feel by a sort of instinct without being able oftentimes to give a reason for it. It leaves no arbitrariness in the choice of opinions and sides to be taken; and by its use can always be determined the most advantageous choice. Thereby it supplements most happily the ignorance and weakness of the human mind.' [1]
The man was brilliant!
This concept of causation underlies Laplace's striking formulation of universal determinism, Treating the history of the universe as a single process, he maintained that, from a complete specification of the state of the universe at a given instant (initial positions and velocities of all bodies), a superhuman intelligence knowing the laws of nature could infer all past and all future states of the universe. Laplace assumed that mass, position, velocity (the terms of Newtonian physics) would suffice for the required specification. Since it is doubtful, however, not only whether the terms of Newtonian physics or any possible future physics would suffice, but also whether even a superhuman mind could specify, in any terms, a state of the whole universe, Laplace's formulation has been rejected by many determinists. It is now more promising to define universal determinism as the doctrine that every event in principle falls within some deterministic system. [2]
I argue that to pick out and isolate 'that which is described as participating in an 'event' i. e., a billiard ball is to unfairly attribute 'causality' to a single causal object, which in fact is merely the end-proxy of all the events which have led up to its existing on the table before the cue hits it and it becomes a moving causal object rather than a stationary one. The same can be said for the other ball to which it is directed, and the billiard-player, the table, the building, the town and ultimately the Big bang itself.
Having said that, I UNDERSTAND why the human is directed towards and is interested in the performance of the billiard balls which he 'thinks' he is controlling - because even if he was aware that the event he had 'created' on the table was all worked out even before he took the cue out of the rack and whether or not the B-ball drops in the pocket is predetermined. (Though NOT humanly predictable)
We all seem to completely forget or ignore the fact that events must be seen holistically. In the case of billiard balls, one cannot ignore the state of the ball being struck - . but for me it is not a case of ignoring the fact that the ball has been struck. What happens on the billiard table is very important from the anthropocentric view of the billiard player, where the event of the striking balls is actually of more import to him than to some far-off giant star being sucked into a black hole and crushed to the size of a billiard ball.
It is the mental singling-out [in natural languge terms 'victimisation of the cue-ball as the fall-guy who takes the causal rap'] of the cue-ball as being the cause of the stationary ball being moved.
In fact the cue-ball is the 'innocent victim of concatenational circumstance. '
Therefore, whilst it is perfectly satisfactory and understandable to blame, or to attribute causal responsibility, to the poor old cue-ball from a pragmatic or humanly commonsensical point of view, but not from the point of view of the scientist.
The dualism - 'moving' or when referring to a moving ball - 'its motion' does not exist - it is 'the moving causal ball' which eventuates as a 'causal object' in it impingement upon another ball
As Laplace says - only a superhuman intelligence knowing the laws of nature could work out ahead of time what will happen in the world - and neither of those fictions exist. We can plan, conjecture and make intelligent guesses, but if it were possible - it would already have happened - and competitive sport would be not be worth watching if the outcome were to be known in advance..
It is not part of the eliminativist agenda to either proscribe the use of 'fiction' in language or to physically eliminate those who employ such terms - it is merely a desire that when people use such fictions that they realise that the fictions [like freedom or freedom of will etc.] do not really exist.
Anyone adopting Eliminative Determinism would certainly be effected by its implications for Free Will, for it is a more radical form of Determinism, in that even human beings are referred to as causal objects and its assault on abstraction is merciless. For Free-willers who value their independence and like to think they make choices in their lives this would probably be difficult to live with. Because eliminative determinism is in a certain sense an offshoot of eliminative materialism it also provides one with a ready-made explicatory ontology from those that approach you from the position of The Philosophy of Mind. So to finish up I am sorry that I cannot say more - I guess I will fall back upon the position that Knowledge is Power and I certainly believe that eliminative determinism is intellectually empowering - but what is to be done with that power once it is attained is another question that only the individual can answer.
Eliminative Determinism has no bone to pick with the traditional doctrines of determinism, apart that is from removing the transcendentalist and reificational medievalisms of 'event' and 'cause', etc. the rest is left more or less intact. Knowing this doesn't mean that eliminative determinists are any the less subject to the vagaries of the inevitable consequences of antecedent behavioural causal objects than ordinary folk - it just means that eliminative determinists understand perfectly why things are panning in their lives the way they are, and that though they are helpless to do anything other than conduct themselves in the best way they can for themselves and their loved ones they are philosophically equipped and more than usually empowered to understand it all and see it through.
Jud Evans 12 May 2006
References:
(1) Kohler, Heinz. Amherst College. International Encyclopedia of Statistics, vol. 1 (New York: Free Press, 1978), pp. 493-499; Dictionary of Scientific Biography, vol. 15 (New York: Scribner's, 1978), pp. 273-403. The above quote is from Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (New York: Dover, 1951), pp. 3-4, 6-7 and 196.
[2] Donagen, Alan. The Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Electronic Text Center PO Box 400148
Charlottesville VA 22904-4148434.924.3230 | fax:434.924.1431 http://etext.virginia.edu/cgi-local/DHI/dhi.cgi?id=dv2-02
