Eliminative Determinism" is a new anti-metaphysical 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.

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.'


Causal Objects A. Every cosmic entity is a causal object. B. Every event is caused by a causal object. C. Therefore every human is causal object. D. Events couldn't have happened otherwise. E. Objects couldn't have existed differently F. Abstractions Cause and Effect do not exist.

The core eliminative determinist paradigm is indeed parsimonious and can be expressed in a few words (which I will demonstrate presently) but first a word to qualify eliminative determinism in relation to the better-known "eliminative materialism" of the husband and wife team professors Pat and Paul Churchland.

The neuro-physicalist approach of the Churchlands is mainly targeted at folk psychology and the psycho-philosophical rump that continues to believe that the human body is possessed by a psychic spook called by them "mind." Whilst eliminative determinism agrees with the Churchlands' seminal work as the most important contribution to western philosophy in the 20th century, eliminative determinism broadens the debate to encompass the whole of human communication with regard to the exposure of the reificational virus which has bedevilled philosophy and human relations for millennia.

Eliminative determinism can be summed up by saying

(A) Only spatially extended causal matergy exists. Individuate human objects are also causative matergy.

(B) The rest is what is accurately or inaccurately (reificationally) thought and said of them by effected and effecting communicative human causal objects."

The term "matergy" is being used increasingly by scientists to avoid the passé dualistic description of energised material as: "matter and energy."

Any longwindedness that I may display (for which I apologise) is characteristic of my Liverpool - Celtic background, but is also characteristic of the early phase of explaining what the above definition means to those unfamiliar with such a new paradigm.

Initially the responses of my interlocutors are automatically and unconsciously peppered with the very reifications that they have internalised since childhood - and they are the very linguistic elements that eliminativists deny as meaningful features of strict ontological analysis. Hence the recurring replies: "stamp-collecting does not exist - only stamps and stamp collectors and their albums exist" etc.

It is refreshing to read that nowdays an increasing number of people no longer consider actions to be entities, for in spite of the overwhelming number of people out there who think likewise (I refer to my polls) there still remains a rag-bag of the public, some of whom who claim to be philosophers, who do think that "the movement of an arm exists" (as well as - or in addition to - the human mover.)

Whatever animate object "do" all "doing" is "change" and "change" does not exist - only the changing or changed entity exists. If I ask you to identify the change between the perfectly formed green apple we see at the beginning of the month and the same (now ripe) perfectly formed apple a month later you will point to the reddened skin.

But you will not be pointing to an abstraction called "change" you will be indicating the transformed skin as an existential modality of the changed apple.

If you will forgive a short winded diversion here, for me the abstract noun 'perfection' or the adjective 'perfect' are only meaningful when construed as referring to the state of some matergenic object that is fully realized as a current entiatic actuality, as opposed to a reified potentiality or counterfactual possibility.

As far as nature is concerned entities cannot BE imperfect. They either survive or they do not. They either function or they do not. The exist in such a manner and cannot have ever existed in any other way. Deterministically they exist as a ontological fait accompli - an irreversible concatenational accomplishment. They either [if organic] pass on their seed or they do not. They either find an environmental niche or they do not and their "type" dies out [is unreplicated] or it reproduces in its niche and flourishes.

Now this introduces yet another indication which demonstrates that it is impossible for anything other than matergenic objects to ever exist

If I were ever to use such a term in ontology and MEAN that something was perfect (which I would not) then it would have to be in conjunction with "conatus," the striving or 'natural tendency inherent in a body to develop itself,' leading to an eventual, if only temporary: 'perfected material presence.' A non-material object could never do this - because it has no body to strive to develop.

Someone wrote: The being of a thing is its being-thus.

The above sentence (The being [1] of a thing is its being-thus.[2] ) neatly encapsulates ALL that is wrong with traditional western philosophy, for it combines both the reificative virus and its host.

There is an ontological world of difference betwixt the gerund "being" [1] usually capitalised when discussing the Philosopher of Nazism Heidegger's obsessional (many think autistic) preoccupation with the word  "Being," which means existence (or in Heideggerian nursery-language) "Being there." (or here) and [2] which is an instance of the normal present progressive tense (also called the present continuous conjugation of the verb "be."

"Be" as expressed in the construction: "Being-thus" or "existing in this way, manner or mode bespeaks of an entity that already exists and what is described by "being-thus"  (being a doctor, a lover or being unhappy or a thief.)

Bottom line? Whilst an object's "being this" or "being that " is an acceptable and important part of valid predicative human sentence strings, the "being" of an object or the  "existence of an object" is ontological gobbledegook - an object simply exists it does not "HAVE" an "existence - existence is not a property.

The fact that the gerund is (morphologically) identical in form to the present participle (ending in -ing) confuses people. There is no such thing in the cosmos as "the being of an object, a thing or an idea," etc. Ontologically the "being of an object" can only be referred to as a modal characteristic of the existing object (as in "John is being naughty.") One could never say "the being of John is being naughty" because the reified form of "Being" (the abstract noun or gerundial form) does not exist.

Incidentally the preposition "to" can also be used to introduce the infinitive ending up in what is sometimes called the gerundial infinitive. This is most notoriously evident in Hamlet's "to be, or not to be?"

"Correlates" and "consequences" do not exist. Only that which is physically capable of being correlated into a reciprocal or mutual relation and is the deterministically engendered outcome or consequence of the catenulate interactions of antecedal causal objects exists.

The "Being" of a dancer does not exist. The reason we explain the particular way that John sometimes exists by using the simple present version of "be" as in: "John is a dancer." or " The dancer is John" concerns the "is of identity" which is the subject of another fascinating and learned "pushing-the-envelope" discussion on the forum right now between Jonathan and Martin.

According to Parmenides one cannot ( or certainly should not) talk about "nothing." (to mae on.) Notoriously Plato claimed that "nothing" exists, because it is a "heteron"  (the opposite of something) The goofball Heidegger got himself involved in similar juvenilia, ("the nothing nothings" and other crap.) My attitude or approach to all reification (non-existent abstraction) is the same. I state the obvious (like you have done above when you agreed that "actions are not entities.") that actions, labour, capital, force, energy, change, movement, relationships, love, speed, spinning cotton etc. does not exist and therefore should never be existentialised or reified to give the impression that it does. When people begin to believe such things it leads to misunderstand and conflict and leaves the door wide open to the reifiers like Hitler gassing people in their millions, and religious fanatics piloting planeloads of screaming passengers into skyscrapers full of screaming office-workers, to say nothing of the born- again arch-reifiers Bush and Blair sending hoards of aircraft to bomb the shit out of innocent Iraqi men, women and children.

I consider that human reifiers in positions of power together with global warming are probably the most dangerous threat to the future survival of the human race. All politicians and religionists are reifiers, and many politicians are religionists. Reification provides a obfuscatory screen of indeterminacy from behind which they can manipulate the masses. Up until now although they have been responsible for the most horrific carnage and destruction they have not exploded any more H-Bombs for a long time - things are changing now. More and more regimes are getting their hands on weapons of mass destruction. I have nine children - I fear for their lives.

Regarding "things." Mereologically speaking it depends upon what is meant [denoted) by the word "things" and/or "entities". The greatest division between the notions of Parmenidean ontology and Platonic is the Eleatic philosopher's insistence of the cosmos as "The One."

For example, there are two ways of looking at a heap of sand or the starry sky above. One can observe the heap as a complete entity - as a unity of parts or a holon - or one can home-in and appreciate the individual grains which (deterministically) have ended up together contiguously in what humans call "a" (in the singular) "heap." We can raise our eyes in our: "wide-angle lens mode" to the heavens and see the Milky Way as one enormous whole (as Parmenides did before us) or we can alter the focus and pick out individual planets and stars, which, if we are knowledgeable in these matters we can name as singletons.

To my knowledge ALL scientists agree that the constituent building blocks of matter are indestructible - they can change (they would not exist in the first place if they were incapable of that) but cannot be eliminated entirely. Similarly no new matter can be created or "come into existence" ("existence" does not exist to be entered into anyway.) In other words matter is ubiquitous everywhere. The creation myth (creatio ex nihilo) is utter nonsense. The existence or non-existence of matter, (matergy, force-fields, call it what you will) is (like Hamlet's "to be or not to be") physically or non-physically utterly impossible. We live in a material universe and exist as parts of the self-regulating  "Material Imperative." That does NOT mean that such a thing as "self-regulation" exists of course - only "that which is imperatively self-regulated" exists.

Like eliminative determinism, the material imperative can be very economically fornmulated as

The Existential Imperative

No Causal Object = No Change
No Change = No Cosmos

No heteronic "nothing" (the crazed Platonic concept that "nothing" exists as an entity different from something) or "non-existents" exist, for there is no state of "non- existence," or "being the opposite of existence" or existing "in" or "as" a "void." The idea of a vacuum is a primitive myth, for the cosmos is entirely composed of ever- changing matergy most of which, according to the most recent reports is "dark" or "brown" matter. We are the eternal matergy of the stars, and upon our deaths the perpetually materially reconstituted "that which was us" will remain so for ever.