PICKING UP THE PIECES.


JUD EVANS:
As an Eliminative Determinist I believe that NOTHING that we do or think is not the result of antecedal events. Though I DO BELIEVE and agree with Richard that most people have the FEELING and the BELIEF that it is otherwise.


GARY.C. MOORE:
I essentially agree with you but I also think Richard has a point stronger than it initially seems. First of all I think we have to make a distinction between *feeling* and *belief*. A *feeling* is simply an impulse that *comes up* and is present-at-hand. In popular culture one identifies with it, it is the real *you*, but this is non-sense. *Feeling* is precisely the *antecedal event* you are talking about, learn from experience as indiscriminate and unanalytical education as a child. But now you are suppose to be a man. What is a man? One who primarily uses reason and all else is secondary or even trivial. Reason is the only judge, that is, a judge who is not whimsical and arbitrary but takes both sides of the issue into account, weighs them, and comes to a decision that first of all accounts for the known facts, and then secondarily accounts for the circumstances and the obscurities or unknowns of the matter.

JUD EVANS:
I was careful to write *feeling* AND *belief.* But yes, you are right about *feeling* - it is often based upon intuition and guesswork based upon superficial - hunches and subliminal hints and hunches.

GARY.C. MOORE:
Yes you did, and I appreciate it. But I try to keep in my mind this is a public forum, and though I rarely succeed as I want to, I try to survey problems seen from several points of view. This includes even my own when they are equivocal such as with the term *belief*. I do not think the final word can be said on it even when it is used to justify things one does not think justified. John Henry Newman taught me this. And Epictetus constant reiteration that everyone thinks they are doing what is logically consistent with their self interest, such as the theorem *Do not lie* while not, as he points out so well, logically analyzing that but accepting it unquestioningly and without consistent understanding.

     It not only fills a gap between sense experience and logically stated knowledge - but this is, again, equivocal, as one does always have to apply the rules of logic as the only final judge in the matter, but on the other hand, sense knowledge is like the Stoics say, that is, it is there, its presence forces your hand to make some kind of judgment, but sense knowledge itself [this is a wonderful insight on their part, usually evaded or ignored even by so-called Stoics] does not *tell* [in any linguistic sense] you anything, it does not command you, it does not force your mind to assent though it may force your body [here the *reactive disassociation* of Eliminative Materialism has been of immense help]. Therefore the only way to handle it is the Stoic stance of educated detachment, a *neutrality* that detaches you by training from any automatic initial reaction that you cannot help. Then comes deliberate logical analysis. This is Aurelius’ breaking it down into parts, meaning a *conceptual* meaning automatically claims the sense impression like a melody, but he breaks it down into the parts you cannot care about in themselves so you can judge them logically and then judge the final product from that perspective. It takes the excitement and romance out of it, true, but such things, however pleasurable, are far more deceitful and treacherous and leads one into a slovenly frame of mind with regard to far more important distinctions.

     That is how life is lived. It is composed of *things found*. As just *found* there, A] You are told how they make sense, and B] if you really learn how to use reason - which always automatically means thinking for yourself - you discover A1] they make sense in only other peoples’ constructs, and B1] may not make any sense at all in objective neutral logic, and B2] may not be all appropriate for your situation however logically appropriate they may be for their situation. This is why I like Epictetus chapter 30 in the ENCHIRIDION. Real Stoic rules of morals follows Polonius’ dictum in HAMLET,

QUOTE:*
To thine own self be true and thou shalt be false to no man*.
END QUOTE

     This means you are born into a unique situation all your own, you agree to commitments without fully understanding them because you are too ignorant, and, when educated and mature, one does not just surgically remove all these commitments because consented to without full knowledge but as judiciously like an Aristotelian judge who is not God but merely a mortal, situationally fixed finite being.
One has to make assumptions based on different kinds of belief based on one's unique situation. Nero was probably very justified in murdering his murderous and treacherous mother Agrippina - but unfortunately this was after she got rid of Seneca as his advisor. Some moral commitments one does have to surgically remove. Claudius, one must sympathize however disastrous this was for other people [in a sense they asked for it by their behavior towards him] , stayed loyal to his murderous and vicious wife Messalina because she was the only person in the world that treated him decently.

     Only an outsider would say this relation should be amputated. Marcus Aurelius stayed loyal to his wife Faustina even though it was rumored [!] she was adulterous and even tried to have him overthrown by her lover, and he stayed loyal to his son Commodus even though he showed signs of mental and moral weakness [before he actually became emperor himself again just rumors]. Stoics did indeed believe in
*family values*, it is true, but they also believed each family to its own pattern, not the universal mold Bush and the fundamentalist Christians want to legally impose on everyone in the world. So *belief* has many meanings and uses, many justified, many not.

     In this respect, *belief* as a practical assumption based on only experience without the strict and detailed support of logic - but not at all contrary to it either! - has its rightful place. It cannot apply to arguments, for instance, as to God's existence because any concept of *belief* cannot be self-contradictory, but it can apply to situation where 99 times out of 99 an event has always happened in such-and-such a fashion, and so we should expect it to happen the hundredth and a hundred more times exactly the same way in the same circumstances. This is the explanation in David Hume of *belief* in causation, justified by him as it is the only way we can rationally lead our lives, while at the same time allowing for unknown circumstances as often discovered in refined scientific experiments that may always be noticed in the background until a change, for instance simply more refined observation that, as in the Heisenburg Principle, effects the expected chain of cause-and-effect.

JUD EVANS:
In Plato's Theaetetus, which as it happens I am writing and essay upon at the moment and comparing it with The Republic, Socrates' ghost-writer Plato does make a point that is in agreement with what you have just said: Here is some relevant sections plucked from my essay which is concerned with the search for a definition of 'knowledge.'

     Like other Platonic impassable dialogues The Theaetetus is aporetic, as it is a dialogue that ends in an insoluble contradiction or paradox of meanings. But whilst no progress is made, or no definitional advancement is possible, the development of the dialectic is both fascinating and highly educative epistemologically. The Theaetetus includes a preliminary discussion, and one introductory aspirational explanation which, it is said, does not qualify as an explanation, then goes on to evaluate three separate epistemological accounts of knowledge provided by his interlocutor. The discussion is split into roughly three sections:

(a) Knowledge is perception; (b) Knowledge is true belief, and (c) Knowledge is justified true belief.

All three attempted definitions are eventually ruled out, and no successful replacement is provided.

Theaetetus introduces his second attempt at a definition of knowledge in which Knowledge is true belief.

THEAETETUS:
I have heard made by someone else, but I had forgotten it. He said that true opinion, combined with reason, was knowledge, but that the opinion [doxa] which had no reason was out of the sphere of knowledge; and that things of which there is no rational account are not knowable. Such was the singular expression which he used and that things which have a reason or explanation are knowable.

JUD EVANS:
Socrates replies and quickly and dismisses the suggestion with the counter question: 'How can there be anything such as false belief? The would-be definition of knowledge as true belief is finally swiftly dismissed by Socrates as something that people could form a belief about which proved consistent with fact or reality just by mere luck.

GARY.C. MOORE: Excellent! *Luck*!

JUD EVANS:
Theaetetus then remembers having heard that knowledge is true judgement accompanied by Logos (an account) adding that only that which has Logos can be known. I tend to agree with this one, for to me knowledge is justified [verified] true belief. I also agree with the repetitional theory of causation a la Hume - but I understand it differently in that *causality* does not exist - but only the causal objects involved in such repetitional impingement.

GARY.C. MOORE:
I think Hume agrees with you. He says causality is merely a habit abet a useful and even absolutely necessary one.  Now, it is a gross [unrefined] fact that education [as personal experience] changes people. Yes, it is an antecedent effect, but also unless the person is receptive to that experience - as education and improvement! - may be resistant or utterly indifferent to it.

JUD EVANS:
Obligation, indifference or enthusiasm for any educational lessons, theories or experiences, or for any objects [including human objects] for your dog, your motorcar, are also the effects of antecedal influences, because they too are engendered by prior events.

GARY.C. MOORE:
This is demonstrably true. I had tried to send you a number of discussions of the *Stoics* group to show you what I mean. All the great scholars on Stoicism, some of whom say they are not Stoics, I agree with essentially one hundred percent with only very minor adjustments of my part because of my inherent stupidity and lack of a good education.

    These scholars are A. A. Long on Epictetus, Pierre Hadot and R. B. Rutherford on Marcus Aurelius and Christopher Gill on both. I find it utterly amazing so few books have been written on the major Stoic figures whereas numerous books are written on Stoicism in general. Luckily all their books are absolutely superb and I could not ask for anything better. They are also the sole way of systematizing the thoughts of these figures. Unfortunately no one has done a good book on Seneca - or rather one I can afford to buy blindly, and none have been recommended really. They all utterly dismiss any similarity between Stoicism and Christianity, with a God who is actually a *person* in the normal usage of the term, with a systematic, detailed overall morality rather than a few basic rules, with anything dependent on an underhanded concept of the soul's immortality, with the trivialization of science and logic but actually emphatically the reverse - an intense interest in the details of both - though - and this is a rationally consistent and systematic *though* - both methodologies are subservient to the motivation of learning the right way to live - which is actually what any rational person tries to do anyway.

JUD EVANS:
Undertakers and Mortuary personal become indifferent to corpses because they work on them every day, philosophers become enthused and receptive to philosophical discussion born of the familiarity of long association with other philosophers and a conversancy with the technical language used etc.

GARY.C. MOORE:
Been there, done that. Yes, there is an antecedent effect in relation to the effective use of that person's reason to his experience that renders that experience educative.

JUD EVANS:
The so-called process of *reasoning* is no more than a process of sorting through a catenulate compendium of antecedally stored neurological events and undergoing the stereotypical, ritualistic behaviour of imagined *choice* - when in fact the *choice* has already been predetermined before the process of reasoning is launched.

GARY.C. MOORE:
All hail the lover of the doctrines of Marcus Aurelius! Now, to get you to actually read Marcus Aurelius [preferably in a good translation] . . . and not settle for something like BARLETT”S QUOTATIONS as Lecter sneeringly refers to Jack Crawford's Stoicism. Lecter is my role model you know. A good doctor and surgeon.

JUD EVANS:
*Choice* is no more than an agreeable and comforting self deception, which provides us with a misplaced reassurance that we [of all the objects in the cosmos] have a unique of freedom from the ontological iron-grip of catenulation.

GARY.C. MOORE:
This is undeniably not only a good point but also perfectly true. But *choice* can still operate, under what I acknowledge as your provisos I accept unconditionally above, since, using antecedent causes education and change can occur. But why in some people and not in others who are essentially the same, educated the same way, and generally sharing the same values? There does seem to be a directionality in change. One person tries to use their logic in a much more stringent fashion than another though both at least say logic is the ultimate value and the only arbiter of truth. I have really not thought this through, but logic is used situationally, that is, with antecedent causes just like anything else, change does occur through what one must assume are antecedent causes, but A] one, like one's true axioms, may not ever know what they are, and B] emotional determination to stay on the straight and narrow path obviously differs very much from person to person. But these are not at all firm thoughts. One must honestly bring them forward as best once can, and then listen to what others say.

     But even a otherwise intelligent and rational person can balk at *repulsive* facts or repetitive experiences justifying a belief that one can rely upon as a fact. These, true, are antecedent circumstances. And yet some people can - what? - wilfully? - overcome them and others - wilfully? - cannot. This accords with physical experience. Some people do and some people do not. This does not mean arbitrary free will is operative here - I certainly grant that - but it does indicate imponderables, unthinkables, unreachable are present which, though we have no reason NOT to presuppose there are antecedent causes, they are such things we can rarely RELIABLY know them objectively and logically.

JUD EVANS:
Baulking, agreeing, disdaining, stoically ignoring and scorning, lauding and belittling are all typical human reactions based upon prior events.

GARY.C. MOORE:
But detaching oneself, putting the emotions to the side to be judged as objects in their own, to not let emotions enslave you, to be able to quarantine the initial shock that occurs to everybody, to maintain your *freedom* as *detachment* and *independence* no matter what, these are the qualities I need.
Gary: So I think Richard is correct insofar as - as an objective observable event though necessarily superficial only - a real decision can be made by oneself, while, on the other hand, you are right insofar as there is absolutely no reason not to *presuppose* , that is, *believe* there are always antecedal causes. Therefore I, as an Aristotelian Judge, award both sides part of the award even though it does not fully justify their full expectations.

JUD EVANS:
Please supply me with ONE SINGLE decision you or anybody else on earth had made which was not based upon antecedal experience and the catenulation of prior events. Even Jesus Christ - son of God that he claimed to be - ended up on a cross as the result of antecedally determined events.

GARY.C. MOORE:
I cannot and would not desire to do so. But some people can make formative changes to an explicit goal, and endure in it, and most others cannot. Obviously it is a deference in antecedent causes, but of such antecedents that are extremely different from each other.

JUD EVANS: [earlier]
I too like Richard Sansom  have had an awareness of the reality and inevitability of death from a very early age. I agree also that the awareness of impending and inevitable death [as witnessed and experienced from youth onwards] gives one a sense of dread and apprehension that cannot be ignored. I also believe that we should not dwell on death and allow it to become an obsession, but rather *take it in our stride,* which is a rather weak way of saying that we should try to put it in proportion and even be prepared to welcome it should the occasion arise.

GARY.C. MOORE:
I would agree with all that, and have so in the past, but would add that the *inevitability* as well as the *erasure of self, of the now also erases responsibility, both now and after death - unless one voluntarily chooses to take up that responsibility while alive.

JUD EVANS:
I wasn't thinking of an *erasure* of the *now* but rather a coming to terms with the *now* as something which never *goes away.*
*Voluntariness* is simply a recognition and acceptance of the inevitability of determination - a temporary lowering of the *force-shields* that we raise to try to keep out the unsettling bogeyman that we are causally enchained to a far greater extent than Marx ever dreamt of when he spoke of his drones breaking the economic and political chains that bound them - fetters which were in fact the steel-wire constraints of concatenation as well as capitalism.

GARY.C. MOORE:
I think that is all I am really saying too. One is not obligated to be obligated.

JUD EVANS:
Obligation or acceptance or the rejection of obligation is as much determined as any other human action.

GARY.C. MOORE:
But when people tell you should make decisions different from the decisions you have made because that is what you amorphously *should* do, then obviously they have forgotten that have they not? That would seem to be perfectly obvious common sense but just as obviously almost everyone blatantly accepts this totally unjustified presupposition. There is nothing one is physiologically, materially bound or obligated to.

JUD EVANS:
The outlook that there is nothing one is physiologically, materially bound or obligated to, is itself  the result antecedal events that bifurcate backwards into your past.

GARY.C. MOORE:
It is utterly foolish to think any *obligation to live and endure *the outrageous slings and arrows of misfortune* is engraved upon our atoms or is somehow inherent in logic itself.

     The choice to live or die is primary, and any other choice or whimsical, emotional obligation purely fantasy land. There is no *should* operative here since any such logically possible *should* cannot be irrevocably binding. *Courage* is only a virtue if one abides by principles one has voluntarily chosen - it is regretful I have to be redundant - otherwise blind *courage* like anything else *blind* is just stupid. Your responsibility for anything whatsoever - ever- dies when you die - which means it was a mere choice while you were alive, and as a mere choice, it can always be undone. Simply because another person has chosen to live by a certain set of standards, it is utterly ridiculous and irrational to presuppose that person's standards are necessarily binding on you who have not accepted them clearly and rationally. Of course, none of this applies to you Jud.

JUD EVANS:
I think it possible that the above passage is in effect a realisation, justification, reinforcement, vindication and rationalisation of your initial deterministically engendered *decision* to reject obligation when you previously *decided* that *there is nothing one is physiologically, materially bound or obligated to.*

GARY.C. MOORE:
Yes.

JUD EVANS:
Like Heidegger, for a time, in my early twenties, I harboured the supercilious and arrogantly superior belief that because I was aware of this foregone conclusion, which seemed to colour and influence and add an air of romantic, touching, sadness or mysterious idealist morbidity to all my doings and relationships - that the *others* - those I perceived to be oblivious or perhaps contemptuous of their inevitable deaths - were intellectually inferior
.
GARY.C. MOORE:
Jud, I hate to disagree with you but it does make you intellectually superior and, just merely numerically, on a grand scale. The vast number of people in my experience want to keep living no matter what - literally - despite the vastly increasing amount of misery they endure, despite the fact they are living off other people's money to keep them barely alive, despite the fact they are not only utterly useless to others but are useless to themselves, despite the fact they are destroying the lives of those people they purportedly *love*, and obviously obsessed with an overwhelming fear of death for whatever reason. They even complain of the pains necessary to keep them beyond the near edge of death so as to preserve them for a few insignificant, useless moments more from the bugaboo *pain* of death.

JUD EVANS:
My *life events* have determined that I have an empathetic relationship with most of the folk that I come into contact with. I am aware of society's interpersonal  *house rules. * Apart from friends, to whom I extend a genuinely warm and sincere feeling of concern and obligation, to me it is equally pointless to treat people well, as to treat people badly, so I might as well treat people nicely. If people treat me badly, as they have done on the Heidegger list for years, then my deterministically initiated arbitrariness in favour of *niceness* defaults back to the *treat people badly* mode - and I hit back ruthlessly as you have witnessed over time.

    In other words the middle-class veneer sloughs-off like a snake shedding its skin and I revert back to the *Liverpool Street Arab* that I really am - but a metamorphosed *articulate* street Arab - using words as weapons rather than real knives.

GARY.C. MOORE:
I take it then you believe as I do, real ethical commitments occur specifically with specific individuals in a *Come as you are* fashion and not one set of rules applying universally to everybody regardless of the situation?


JUD EVANS:
For a few adolescent years it was a wonderfully wistful wallowing in self-obsessed lugubriousness verging upon weepiness, or perhaps it was no more than ennui at my perception of the seeming reluctance of my fellow citizens to recognise my self-estimated uniqueness?

GARY.C. MOORE:
And now that we are old, we see that nobody is any different from anybody else and no one more *valuable* - unless one personally judges them individually to be so - for oneself only!

JUD EVANS:
Hmmm. Of course you are correct about using people - but although I have been using the guy in my local pub, who has been serving me the drinks I order for many years our initially *instrumental* relationship has matured into one of mutual respect and genuine affection.

GARY.C. MOORE:
Adaptation, change, formulation of intent through experience as being selectively open to education?

JUD EVANS:
You could say that my wife and kids are *useful* to me, in the sense that I *use* their love for me to satisfy my need to be loved - and they *use* my love for them to satisfy their need for security and love from me. It has been said that when we cry at the loss of a loved one - we really cry for ourselves and OUR loss.

GARY.C. MOORE:
But you do not let this enslave you. Remember Thomas Huxley when someone taunted him on saying that human beings were descended from such *inferior* beings as apes, and he responded, When an ape's loved one dies, he momentarily sorrows, then goes and does what he has to do. When a human being’s loved one dies, they weep and wail, cry out against the injustice and tragedy of it all, and leap into the grave as if to turn back time itself. He asked, Who is really the nobler animal?

JUD EVANS:
Like most of us I threw off this infantilism, and it was *bonjour tristesse* as I matured and joined the army and became a man, [are we all unconscious Stoics?)

GARY.C. MOORE:
Yeah, when people tell you are going to die - soon - and miserably - mean it, and then laugh - that really changes one's perspective on the world.

JUD EVANS:
But it seems that the little man Heidegger was a curious exception to this *normal* development of a mature acceptance of mortality?
As far as I know the clinical reports of his self-imposed incarceration in a local nut-house [as the avenging allied tanks rolled into Freiburg] have never been released? If they have, and any Heideggerian thurifer has a copy, [perhaps as a feature of their atriumic household cultic-corner shrine?] I would be most interested to read an account of the symptoms [apart from the obvious one of badly-soiled underpants heavily stained green with half-digested sauerkraut] and study the professional clinical opinion in the records of the mental asylum as to the origins of his madness, and whether the psychological disturbance was genetical or the result of existential experiential contamination?

GARY.C. MOORE:
IF, and only *if*, I remember right, this *nervous breakdown* happened during and after the Allied Council judging whether former Nazi Party members were fit to continue teaching and not have their teaching permits revoked destroyed his privately created myth - perpetuated by him for years afterward none the less - that he was an anti-Nazi *resistance* supporter, if not *fighter* like the slaughtered *White Rose* who actually died for their anti-Nazism. J

JUD EVANS:
My reading of (I think Hugo Ott?] was that he slunk off to the clinic just as the tanks were about to enter Freiburg - but you may be right. BTW - I uploaded a new piece to the Evans Experientialism  site today - yet another  Nazi speech that has come to light by Heidegger.  This one was made in 1933 Leipzig pledging his support of Hitler. A guy came across it on a Neo-Nazi site and posted it on to me. The Neo-Nazis refer to him as *Our Martin.* Here is the URL:

http://evans- experientialism. freewebspace. com/heidegger_ nazi.htm

GARY.C. MOORE:
Heidegger was neither and honest psychopath - at least to himself - and certainly therefore could not be Stoic right from the word *Go!*
Gary: They brought out the facts that he had paid his party dues up to the moment the party dissolved as well as participated in the Nazi purging of Freiburg University of Jews, Catholics, and liberals in the 1930s. Supposedly he either collapsed during or immediately after the interview that revoked his license. It is hardly the behavior of a Nazi  *Stoic*. The local Catholic Archbishop tried desperately to bring him back into the Church, but Heidegger, crying a river of tears, regretfully declined. Why all this witnessed and legally objective evidence took so long to come out - and be believed! - until Farias, and even more effectively Thomas Sheehan including making people take Farias seriously! - brought it all out in the late 1990s when Walter Kaufmann and Schneeburger were crying *FOUL!* back in the 50s and 60s - still amazes me.


JUD EVANS:
Me too - talk about ostriches sticking their NECKS in the sand, those Heidegger-apologists stuck their whole bodies head-downwards in the sand and mouthed their protestations of his insouciance using their haemorrhoids as acoustic membranes and their anal-sphincter to enunciate the words. What the cowardly ghoul Volkgenosse Heidegger and his fellow benighted Bedouin's of *Being* were doing was manipulating the simple-minded - putting the frighteners on naive fools - by employing the age-old, Christian cosenage - trafficking in the fear of death.

He was in effect nothing more than *God's Leading Banquet-Pooper. *


GARY.C. MOORE:
O Aristophanes! *Bedouins of Being*! When someone has pooped all over your Banquet, leave it. But Heidegger's poop is not worth noticing.

JUD EVANS:
I have had A LOT OF FUN playing with his polemical poo-poo - much more fun than playing buckets and spades on Southport beach. ;-0

GARY.C. MOORE:
I hope you are not terribly offended that I cut out what I thought were irrelevant - to me - portions of your letter!

JUD EVANS:
Offended? Not at all. People I like and respect don't offend me - its the ones that I don't like and don't respect that offend me.

RICHARD SANSOM: previously
*Even having said the above, I nevertheless have the feeling and the belief that I am in charge of what I do and what I react to; I have the sense that my decisions are my own and I am not beholden to any other impetus that guides my thought unless I give up that control.*

JUD EVANS:
As an Eliminative Determinist I believe that NOTHING that we do or think is not the result of antecedal events. Though I DO BELIEVE and agree with Richard that most people have the FEELING and the BELIEF that it is otherwise.

GARY.C. MOORE:
I essentially agree with you but I also think Richard has a point stronger than it initially seems. First of all I think we have to make a distinction between *feeling* and *belief*. A *feeling* is simply an impulse that  *comes up* and is present-at-hand. In popular culture one identifies with it, it is the real *you*, but this is non-sense. *Feeling* is precisely the  *antecedal event* you are talking about, learn from experience as indiscriminate and unanalytical education as a child. But now you are suppose to be a man. What is a man? One who primarily uses reason and all else is secondary or even trivial. Reason is the only judge, that is, a judge who is not whimsical and arbitrary but takes both sides of the issue into account, weighs them, and comes to a decision that first of all accounts for the known facts, and then secondarily accounts for the circumstances and the obscurities or unknowns of the matter.

     In this respect, *belief* as a practical assumption based on only experience without the strict and detailed support of logic - but not at all contrary to it either! - has its rightful place. It cannot apply to arguments, for instance, as to God's existence because any concept of *belief* cannot be self-contradictory, but it can apply to situation where 99 times out of 99 an event has always happened in such-and-such a fashion, and so we should expect it to happen the hundredth and a hundred more times exactly the same way in the same circumstances.


RICHARD SANSOM:
Yes, we DO expect it, however Popper has a mighty good argument that states as far as scientific surety, induction is flawed. For ordinary life it seems to work fine. I suppose if we lived our lives without an *expectational reservoir* it would be a mess.

GARY.C. MOORE:
What I said above about *sense impressions* cannot linguistically communicate with one. This agrees with what you say here. This is the explanation in David Hume of *belief* in causation, justified by him as it is the only way we can rationally lead our lives, while at the same time allowing for unknown circumstances as often discovered in refined scientific experiments that may always be noticed in the background until a change, for instance simply more refined observation that, as in the Heisenburg Principle, effects the expected chain of cause-and-effect.
RICHARD SANSOM: Your remark that *belief* in causation, justified by him as it is the only way we can rationally lead our lives,* is almost precisely what Kant said in rebutting Hume!  Kant worked at a huge disadvantage with regards to Hume having only snippets of A TREATISE ON HUMAN UNDERSTANDING and THE ESSAY ON UNDERSTANDING in German. But where did he say this? I would be interested.


JUD EVANS: I too like Richard have had an awareness of the reality and inevitability of death from a very early age. I agree also that the awareness of impending and inevitable death [as witnessed and experienced from youth onwards] gives one a sense of dread and apprehension that cannot be ignored. I also believe that we should not dwell on death and allow it to become an obsession, but rather *take it in our stride,* which is a rather weak way of saying that we should try to put it in proportion and even be prepared to welcome it should the occasion arise.


GARY.C. MOORE:
I would agree with all that, and have so in the past, but would add that the *inevitability* as well as the *erasure of self, of the *now* also erases responsibility, both now and after death - unless one voluntarily chooses to take up that responsibility while alive. One is not obligated to be obligated. That would seem to be perfectly obvious common sense but just as obviously almost everyone blatantly accepts this totally unjustified presupposition. There is nothing one is physiologically, materially bound or obligated to. It is utterly foolish to think any *obligation to live and endure *˜the outrageous slings and arrows of misfortune* is engraved upon our atoms or is somehow inherent in logic itself.
RICHARD SANSOM: I have my doubts about Gary's last sentence above. The myriad physical processes of the whole body are [through evolution] designed to preserve homeostasis i. e. stability and LIFE, or existence if you will. So, especially physiologically the remark is questionable IMO As for it being an obligation, that is questionable since we do not confer such things on the actions and reactions of cells and organs -- EXCEPT FOR WHAT THE BRAIN DOES. Obligation, I assume, means volition, something that occurs in thought. Now, this brings up the tantalizing matter of how the brain [thought] deals with homeostasis maintaining balance and health in the body. We know that a great many people, even with knowledge of the harm they do by volition, go ahead and do it anyway, and the rest of the body tries very hard to prevent that harm. It is as if our choices lead to a struggle between the natural process of the body and the effects of those choices we are often at war with ourselves. This is a curious state, unique, I believe, in the animal kingdom; was it all due to  *the fall?*

       But animals, in my experience, both when they are very sick and, seemingly, when they know they are going to die, just lie down and wait. When something just hurts a lot or is broken and only partially incapacitates them, they try to keep doing the same things they always do which is why veterinarians shoot horses with broken legs. But I may be missing your point or just tired.


RICHARD SANSOM:
It troubles me that you believe * see that nobody is any different from anybody else and no one more *valuable* This implies lack of uniqueness among us, and surely this is incorrect.

GARY.C. MOORE:
I would have to go with Jud’s determined antecedents, that is, mere accidents not of our forming is the only thing that makes us different. After all, reason is the same reason for everyone and that is suppose to be the highest, even the only true value for all. Something that happened to my genes or to my experiential environment does not make me valuable to myself though I may be able to take advantage of it. To what purpose? Rational goals. Are rational goals different from person to person? Not as far as reason in itself, only accident makes differences. However, appreciating other people's accidents vastly improves one's own character and broadens not only tolerance but the desire to be like them because they possess something I do not have but they have shown me my reason desires. *Reason desires*? . . . . Hmmm . . .
RICHARD SANSOM:
If you mean that from some cosmic perspective we are all tiny specks of matter, undifferentiated as far as *meaning* and even *cosmic purpose or utility* this rarefied perspective is without much meaning in our lives.

GARY.C. MOORE:
The Stoics use it A] to keep themselves from being enslaved to there accidental emotions, and B] to learn to joyfully appreciate what they do have, instead of wishing for something they do not have and may not at all be attainable.

RICHARD SANSOM:
We not only ARE unique, such uniqueness is the fuel for all human activity. I may personally judge another person as worthless, useless, a blight on humanity, but the tension that assessment creates provides me with a purpose with which to deal with him, if I so choose.

GARY.C. MOORE:
Even with my premises, moral theorems, I agree with you here.