EONIC THEORY
Jud Evans

As an eliminative determinist I do not of course accept the existence of mind, mental states, history or for that matter evolution, but that is not to say that I do not recognise, respect, and appreciate the important contribution provided by the visceral theories based upon such useful fictions used to provide such explanations of entiatic  change as significant stages in the furtherance of the understanding of ourselves as thinking beings.

Regarding the so-called eonic theory and its putative: eonic effect. I have reached the same conclusion as most people - the theory is completely lacking in empirical foundation.   The eonists claim that they: "can use the data of history to assess the earlier stages of human evolution".

Eliminativistically speaking all objects are causal objects and the term  history is a useful-fiction we employ to refer to the written assemblage of accounts of past events,  or a record or narrative description concerning the behaviour of historical causal objects.  

But history is by definition only  the story of antecedent causal objects which can be seen, or which have been actually written about or recorded in some way. Perhaps representationally painted on cave walls, or dug up from the ground, or retrieved from the sea bed as specimen causal objects. As we delve further and further back into the past records and examples of these informative objects,  their numbers become less and less,  they eventually peter  out completely and the efficacy of history as an exploratory tool of evolution becomes  attenuated.

Without the fossils and bones that provide the entablature of comparative study, which is the paleontological domain of anthopology, archeology and the earth sciences that study such fossil organisms and related remains (which is what the Darwinian corpus is all about)  the so-called eonists are rendered empirically sightless and therefore historically, inquisitorially, gnostically, experimentally and observationally speechless as far as any meaningful scientific contribution regarding earlier evolution (human or otherwise) is concerned which extends backward in time beyond a certain chronological point.

Whilst we can observe the cultures and tribal organisations of the most primitive tribes still extant in our world and we can attempt to extrapolate these impressions and map them retrospectively  in order to guess what the attitudes and practices of our primitive forbears might have been, we eventually hit the chronological buffers around the time of the early Paleolithic. In fact the oldest period of the paleolithic, which extended from the Eolithic, some I50,000 years ago, to the Neolithic or New Stone Age (which began about 7, 000 B.C. and of which we know more) is comparatively little known to us apart from what we have learnt from bone fragments and a few artefacts.

Early dates for bone tools, ornaments and decorated objects found in sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa and possibly Israel have led some to argue that many characteristics of the Upper Paleolithic in Eurasia are attributable to the expansion of anatomically and behaviorally modern humans out of Africa. However, other researchers believe these developments to be local or indigenous, reflecting parallel evolutionary trends.

As an eliminative incompatibilist determinist I have some deterministically based disagreements with Darwinism.  But apart from my rejection of chaos and any unknown and unpredictable phenomena that causes events to result one way rather than another,  the fact that I hold that all events are predetermined and are the end-nexus of countless former events, does not mean  that I am unconvinced that the copious empirical fossil evidence satisfactorily backs up the theory of the survival of the fittest. For me the abstractive terms  evolution and  history are simply useful fictions or handy reifications and only the evolving, historical organic entities themselves have ever existed.

The fact that predictability is impossible is not because causal objects are not subject to the antecedent impingements of historical causal objects, or that a putative freedom of will is possible, but because for us humans (indeed for anyone or any entity) the biramous branches of concatenation are so complex and the data so far beyond retrieval it is unrecoverable, that any thought of foresight or anticipation is a waste of time. Our ability to make *educated guesses* is limited to no more than a few concatenational  links backward.


Sometimes, in a court of law, we become privy to the investigation of past events which help reveal the concatenational causes of an accident or crime - but it is seldom that the protagonists' experiential causal chains are traced backwards by the prosecution or defence further than it  is considered neccessry for the judge and jury to be influenced in the matter, exept for a few more isolated and obvious biographical causal links. During the final stages of a trial the defence team may bring to the attention of the court the defendant's unsettled and unhappy early home life and the nature of the social environment he endured as being influential with regard to his criminal activity. This alone is a tacit recognition that prior events do influence later behaviour and perhaps are responsible for certain outcomes..


We see the boiling black clouds forming the towering anvil of a cumulonimbus cloud and then experience a sudden drop in temperature whilst noticing a rapid drop in barometric pressure. Such a chain of events allows us to predict an imminent  storm,


We watch the path of a snooker ball as it rolls about a crowded table impacting first this ball and then that ball. It is all hard to take in for it often happens so quickly, but if we see the sequence played backward on a film we can (with a basic understanding of collision theory and ballistics) understand why the cue ball ended up in the right hand corner pocket.

But that is about as far as we can go - we are concatenationally overwhelmed by the multiplicity and profusion of causal objects and their catenulate sequences that snake back into the past. Such catenulate determinations involve the physical condition and mental attitude of the snooker-player, the construction of the table and its tilt where one part may be undetectably higher or lower than another, not forgetting  the smoothness of the baize and if it has been recently ironed. Then there is the cue and its straightness of shape, the sphericity of  the balls and the very fabric of the snooker room itself.  Its temperature, humidity and any air movement which may unbalance the flat plane of the playing surface and effect the causal objects involved in the game.

If we were able to trace back such a multitude  of causal data (an impossible task so bizarre it is foolish of me even to mention it) then as the great French mathematician Laplace who strongly believed in causal determinism, said:

It goes without saying that the idea of such an intellect is preposterous - but Laplace was perfectly aware of this fact. He was, as a mathematician and scientist, simply stating the fact of the way the world appears for humans,  although he knew well that such a world view can never correspond to the way the world is for nature or what I call the mechanical unfolding of the existential imperative. Things (including electrons fired like bullets at two slits) may appear chaotic to the human observer (and indeed in the past events appeared much more chaotic then than they do now - because of our better understanding of physics) but events determined by previous events are not chaotic.  The happenings we see around us are simply the end products of a number of sequential impingements of causal objects that can often be unravelled and explained by science or even the man in the street. Lapland's stimulating but recognisable counterfactual model of an intellect which at any given moment knew all of the forces that animate nature and the mutual positions of the beings that compose it is... as he would have agreed... an absolute impossibility  - as this account of a famous interaction between Laplace and Napoleon amply demonstrates: 

Intellects and Gods do not exist anyway - only causal objects such as intellectualising intellectuals or that which is intelligent and ideates exists.


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