GARY C. MOORE:
I am going to initially approach your paper by defining certain concepts that I consider problematic. I am going to try to adhere to David Hume as much as I can because A] I neither want or feel it necessary to be an ‘original thinker’ any more and I ‘feel’ - like a blind man using a cane to walk - I accomplish more trying to understand and integrate his processes of thought which discard more and more the abstract processes of any kind of ‘principle’ in all the forms of that words meaning and devolved more and more on the literal historical analysis on how concepts evolve in fact. I find, in ’principle’, you recognize some of the basic forms and processes of a thoughts historical evolution as indicated by your reference to accumulate complexity and the very idea of “progress” is an invented abstraction, based on the accumulation of evidence in the first part of the paper. Because of these statements, and because of Humes analysis of the Puritan revolution in its factual results as utterly opposed to the interests, affections, and principles those changes were motivated by, I basically agree with what you say. Now, I have not read the whole of your paper and may well misinterpret what you say, but constrictions of time and mental ability demand of me I approach first things first.

JUD EVANS:
I thought (had hoped) that perhaps our primitive forefathers would have discovered that all objects [including themselves] are causal, rather than perceiving the falling animal struck with a thrown stone as being the subject of an unworldly abstraction called *causation.*  But I am only quibbling and I am sure the hungry hunters could not care less,  as long as their missile brought down the prey.

RICHARD SANSOM:
Regarding the matter of causation, it is my premise that we developed a sense, feeling or whatever you might call it, that things cause things, BECAUSE WE CAN CAUSE THINGS WITH OUR BODIES. We grasp [unconsciously, more or less] that we have the right or the autonomous right to do things – to make fire, to sharpen stone, to throw a spear, to kill something, etc. Other animals that act, do not do so out of any sense of volition and awareness of their own causal strength. This is what I was trying to say. As for other aspects of the world and its associated causalities, such as volcanoes, rain or drought, disease, lightening, etc. those were seen to be caused by some invisible agent that eventually became gods.

GARY C. MOORE:
Progress as accumulative complexity  I must admit does exist and to a large degree an objective fact. ‘Higher’ is legitimate purely in this context since literal accumulation does raise one to a different view of material problems which demands new ways in which to deal with them that are very different from the view lower down in the pile. This at least seems to me initially a physiological fact distinguishing human from chimpanzee from dolphin. That is, there does seem to be a significant difference in memory and personal identity between the different species. The chimpanzee does progress intellectually to an accumulative higher point of problem solving, but then either loses interest or is incapable of accumulating more whereas a human can accumulate endlessly. There seems to be a stress factor that pushes some but not all humans to cross a certain psychological threshold to get a second wind to accumulate more factual knowledge. Now, the chimpanzee as an individual may have differences as to how accumulative they are, but the magnitude of such accumulation seems insignificant compared to a human. When stressed, the chimpanzee becomes neurotic and psychologically unbalanced to the point of having to be put down. The same thing happens to many humans. We just let them go and concentrate on those who can accumulate more. Greater accumulation does require greater integration of what is accumulated so that there are actually two different processes going on here. One merely piles up, the other sorts things into categories, so that after a while one deals with categories or abstractions of things one is not concentrating on, whereas if one is dealing with a specific problem one breaks it down into an examination of specific accumulated facts.
   
This should highlight what is problematic with the concept ‘world’. There cannot realistically be a ‘we know’, just an ‘I know’. Since basic society, the family, the neighborhood, the city, etc, concentrate on accumulation the same things - words - and integrating them in a relatively similar way - language - we can communicate thoughts from one to an other - but only approximately. There is no real world as a real unitary physical phenomenon, just different individual worlds for different humans that are similar enough to work together roughly. This is determined historically, assuming a physiological similarity in ability. When someone radically diverges from similarity, we classify them by medical definition and law - public concepts all are constrained to interpret in a similar fashion - as insane. Their ‘world’ is too private to be able to communicate effectively with humans bound together by approximate agreement of similarity in thinking.    

So, memory is a demonstrable difference between humans and other animals. It is also demonstrable between different humans. But with humans it is not as rigidly a fixed thing as it is with apes. A human can be forced to learn to a certain point wholly determined by the individual. But what that point is seems to differ from individual to individual. There are all sorts of variations and gradations that make a fixed limit of memory in human being highly ambiguous. I do not see any set limitation in any one person, and maybe with ‘world enough and time’ any limitation could be circumvented. But this ability seems to be quite particular just to human beings.
 
There is also the problem of personal identity. We seem to share this with some apes but not with dolphins and the like. Are the two fundamentally connected in some way, or do we simply lack the knowledge we need of other animal minds?

RICHARD SANSOM:
Garys remarks on accumulated complexity as progress brings back my thoughts on this issue and I am still not entirely satisfied with what I have said about it. In his excellent book Trees, Colin Tudge points out that in the evolution of the Winteraceae tree a complex physiognomy [in the xylem] was replaced by a less complex one and this was progress in terms of the functionality of the distribution of nutrients to the plant. Of this Tudge says: *As we have seen, evolution often leads to simplification….* Now this is quite interesting since IMO progress and complexity while not synonomous, appear to go hand in hand in human evolution/progress. Interestingly, the transistor is far simpler in its construction and physicality than the vacuum tube it replaced. However, the science behind it had progressed and had become more complex in its explanations, therefore one might claim that the whole process of arriving at the transistor was progress and was added complexity in terms of science. The pathway to simplicity may be long, arduous and complex.

As I will try to show in Section II, dealing with scientific and mathematical progress, several very human elements are involved in science that throw a different light on it. For example there is the tendency to admire beauty, elegance and simplicity in a concept or solution. I have read that some believe the Theory of Everything [TOE] will be a relatively simple one line equation that ties all the forces of nature into a beautiful, elegant and simple statement. Einstein’s E=MC^2 is such an equatioN.

GARY C. MOORE:
It is a good idea discussing causing things with our bodies. One can talk legitimately about *cause* as long as it is divorced from an abstract, ideational, magical relationship with a specific effect. It may not even be legitimate to talk about *having effects* even if one confesses one does not really understand what they really are or how they occur. That something happens, even if physical laws can be made to predict specific actions from the incident, still only says if *this occurs, then that occurs* which merely makes it a reliably predictable coincidence that seems to occur all the time but which cannot assume *connection* between one physical object and another. Hume talks about this a great deal. And it might even seem hair splitting until one considers A] the action of gravity - cause and effect separated by great distances as well as total lack of understanding of gravity as an energy source since it does not act like any other causative effectiveness whatsoever, and B] one does *feel* one very specifically *causes* specific effects and even holds oneself and others morally responsible for them. This is custom, though, and cannot be invariable *principle* as physical laws are suppose to be. *Principle* here isw an imaginative analogy taken over from law and politics and applied without a second thought and no justification whatsoever mathematically between physical bodies. That is one of the difficulties I had with determinism as an philosophy. You would have to have the mind of God and directly know the *insides* of everything in the universe.

    But as Hume reiterates time and time again *principle* is always initially moral and political principle, trying to get people to follow a certain course of action or recognize something as fact when it is merely an abstraction. So Richards point of causing things with our body, and the very way it is expressed, points exactly to just that.

     As to complexity, it is always uniquely individual within the field of homogenous brain activity which gets even more complex when one is forced to consider the brain as multiple brains, each functioning in a totally different way from every part - or we would notice their presence in every single thought whereas we seem to have an unbroken seam of identity which we know for a fact cannot really be true. Like I have said of the memory, and others have said of the nerve cells of the cerebrum, everything is potentially connected to everything else where there is simultaneously randomness and order - since there can never be ontological randomness, *real* randomness, because every piece of the pile is where it is at for a specific reason - even if it makes no sense overall.

RICHARD SANSOM:
Dear Gary, Several comments: You say, paraphrasing Hume,*…there is never a perfect physical application of mathematics in all degrees of observation which the concept of an idea in causation would demand.* I agree, but who expects perfection?

GARY C. MOORE:
The whole thrust of philosophy and theoretical science until the mid 20th century - maybe - has been based on the solid perfection of logic and mathematics as a guarantee of truth. This was the very foundation block of Platos school, and even now is the only reliable yardstick of physical observation. There have been exceptions to this rule like the Skeptics of Classical times, but it is only with the growing rebellion of English skepticism of such perfection starting with Lord Francis Bacon, applied to real life situations in Hobbes, encouraged by John Locke, and *perfected* by David Hume that such an assault on mathematical and scientific perfection has even been considered worth while noticing. Hegel dismissed Hume as worthless for not producing anything *positive*. *Positive* metaphysics can only exist on perfect principles. Though invented by the mind, Mind rules the universe perfectly regardless of what you call that mind. In Hegels rationalistic metaphysics, matter is certainly very important and a kind of subordinate final arbiter of fact, but matter can only be comprehended at all as matter not by experience in the final judgment but only by mathematics and logic. And in a rationalistic system this not only makes sense but is a fundamental principle of having a philosophical *system* at all. *Mind* necessarily has to take precedence in all connected and ultimately systematic thinking.

    Hume absolutely has no system. He locates the beginning of any and all philosophies in custom. Everyone develops their own philosophy from their individual life experiences and the customs they grew up with everyone around them expected them to obey. Rationalism, however - and this was Humes chief enemy in philosophy
- Descartes, Malbranche, Montesquieu, Spinoza [one of Goethes and Hegels favorite philosophers], and Leibnitz [though he is the most profound and experientially observant of the Rationalists] - needs to search for a fundamental axiom, a perfect and always applicable principle as a starting point and justification. However, even the Rationalists realized such an axiom is a *presupposition* - wherein Humes *custom* naturally applies - and strove desperately to create a presupposition-less philosophy, an absolutely mental philosophy. Hegel was the last great proponent of Rationalism and it is Heideggers realization of Hegels problem as impossible to solve that makes his own philosophy sound like a thoroughly Hegelianized rehash of Humes A TREATISE OF HUMAN NATURE. He never mentions Humes name that I know of. However, Hume was his mentor Edmund Husserls favorite philosopher as well as one of Kants. But the other favorite philosopher of Kant, as well as Heidegger, was Liebnitz. Leibnitz - to provide background - fought Sir Issac Newton viciously over who had priority in the discovery of the calculus. Both Liebnitz and Heidegger had a great regard for the truth value of mathematics as the only guarantor of epistemological perfection - except Heidegger had read Russells and Whiteheads PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA cover to cover and knew there were severe problems with mathematical perfection. Heidegger once said
*Hegel - almost - understood the truth* so Heidegger definitely regrets the passing of Rationalism in favor of experience. But that, fully, is a complicated issue I barely understand at all. However, the chief high lord marshal of Rationalism in the 20th century was Albert Einstein who, when confronted with Quantum mechanics, said *God does not play dice with the universe*. Now, I am skeptical of Quantum mechanics - but that is mainly because [A] I do not understand it, and [B] too many people have tried to use it to justify supernatural phenomena. Obviously the technologically applied parts of quantum mechanics we find all around us now in daily life seems to justify at least some aspects of it - or maybe those aspects can actually be explained without quantum mechanics. I do not know.

RICHARD SANSOM:
The fact that perfection cannot obtain in mapping mathematics to some physicality does not remove a valid Idea of cause and effect – does it?

GARY:
Its reliability is its sole justification. *It has always happened that way in the past so we expect it to continue to act that way in the future*. It is simply experience and not a description of a state of being. There is nothing in an object to identity as *cause* and nothing to identify as *effect*. There are much better ways to describe the process and those terms can only be misleading, refering back to an outdated Rationalist philosophy.

RICHARD SANSOM:
Any Idea of causation is a construct of the mind and has no ontic reality – therefore why would we ever assume that an Idea can be accurately or perfectly manifest in some physical event or thing?

GARY:
If that is so, of what possible use is it?

RICHARD SANSOM:
Mathematics, or rather mathematical equations that describe the physical world are purely and only things of the mind and, within the mind they may be regarded as *perfect* [in a rather Platonic fashion!] but outside the mind, in using them, they must fail to be perfectly isomorphic with what they describe – be it a circle or cause and effect relationship.

GARY:
Invalid presuppositions must be accepted to have such thoughts. For instance, it is more effective to consider how a circle is actually thought. Considering such is precisely what created calculus which exposes the actual lack of perfection of the circle even in our thoughts.

ICHARD:
But cant I hold the Idea of a perfect circle in my mind much in same way that I can hold some cause-effect relationship? Using the old metaphor of billiards, when I aim the cue stick I hold in my mind a cause-effect event; if I could not do this, I could not play the game, or in any case, my actions would be nonsense.

GARY C. MOORE:
The last chapter of Part 1 of Humes A TREATISE OF HUMAN NATURE quite specifically deals with just this billiards problem. I think you will find it very interesting.

RICHARD SANSOM:
When I wrote *one would assume that the innate urge toward progress or improvement in what we build and create has become, through evolution, a part of our genes….* I should not have used *innate* since anything innate IS in our genes. As to your comment that improvement is always motivated by an irritation of some sort, I disagree. When talking about the improvement through changes in a tool or gadget, or bridge or car, there is no irritation but rather an awareness of conceptual possibilities, as I tried to explain later in the piece.

GARY C. MOORE:
*Irritation* is merely a technical term for experience intruding into the thought process asking for attention.

RICHARD SANSOM:
You are speaking [in this paragraph] of the broader aspects of evolution when dealing with nature. I see improvement in technologies as separate from somatic evolution that deals with survival, although quite often the two are connected. While the sharper spear or axe may indeed provide better immediate survival for some individual or group, the cognitive creative act of spear improvement cannot be likened to *descent with modification* or *natural selection,* etc. It is my opinion that the key to understanding how and why things are improved lies in an understanding of how we conceptualize things, create and use universals.

GARY C. MOORE:
In the history of science it is always the breakdown of theoretical models at some point that makes experience demand a new theory.

RICHARD SANSOM:
Neanderthal man apparently never conceptualized sharpness, piercing-ness, etc. and therefore he never improved his cutting and killing tools. Homo sapiens, however, developed those concepts, therefore could make improvements. Not only that, he acquired a sense of autonomy and an awareness of his *causal ability.* This is briefly what I was trying to say in the paper.

GARY:
I disagree. First, how can you make such judgments? Secondly, late Neanderthal tools have been praised by archeologists because they were surprised at the fineness of their technique. This issue was raised because there was no known example of Neanderthal cave painting at a time when Neanderthal and Sapiens cultures were contemporary.

RICHARD:
I am not sure I grasp what you were saying in your reference to fundamentalist Islam. In my paper I intentionally avoid such things as societal improvement, political improvement, religious improvement, economical improvement, and so on. These are vastly complicated and well beyond my capabilities to address, especially in a brief paper. As for your remark: *However, there is a principle of improvement clearly present even here.* [i. e. the self-destructive power of Islam] I disagree that there is any kind of *principle of improvement* involved in such behavior.

GARY C. MOORE:
A very good example of the self-destruction of a religious culture is to be found in Humes analysis of Puritanism in the fifth and sixth volumes of the HISTORY. Hume recognizes the growth of Puritan political power was directly based on the tremendous growth of economic power of the middle class who by 1630 had more wealth than all the royalty of England combined. It was also a class war. As the Puritans gained more political power, they destroyed all those who claimed any sort of special inherited privilege. It was a poltical improvement in the sense that there was a realistic recognition of who really had the weath of Britain in their hands and therefore had real power however ruthlessly it was used. All the royalty was utterly powerless when just ten years before they had all political power in their grasp merely through inertia and custom. There was religious improvement because the Puritans constantly trumpeted the doctrine of political freedom while trying to maintain an Athenian like democratic tyranny because they were, for the moment, the apparent majority. However, their own weapon was soon turned against them because [A] thousands of splinter groups formed in opposition to Puritan strictures, laws, and outright oppression which was [B] practically reinforced because it was precisely these splinter groups that provided the best soldiers in Oliver Cromwells army, and when the Puritan leaders demanded he kick them out of the army he refused because he said they were his best fighters. As for Islam, that is merely a hope upon my part that common humanity will eventually destroy the now overwhelming power of the mullahs since the two are diametrically opposed and a new fundamental inter-social problem in Islam seems to occur several times a week now. It would seem almost inevitably the power of the mullahs will totally collapse, and with them all fanatical Islamic groups whatever their shade will also be exterminated by the mass of people tired of these fanatics destroying their lives. If this happens, I think Humes analysis of the Puritan revolution will be a close model for what happens in Islam.

RICHARD SANSOM:
I suppose you are referring to the assumed attitude of fanatical Muslims who might believe that they are improving the world by destroying infidels?

GARY C. MOORE:
But in Islam everyone is an infidel who does not believe exactly as you believe, so the first and most immediate enemy is your next door neighbor. Not only are Shia killing Sunnis but Sunnis are killing any Sunnis that disagree with them. There are numerous splinters that have existed a long time in Islam in each and every party. If the community of Islam, a fundamental principle of their faith that operates like the KGB, breaks down and especially if family loyalty - actually probably a pre-Islamic culture value - crumbles - at the moment it is the only thing that protects any and all of the Islamic leaders, public and especially underground like Taliban and Al Queda - then the whole structure will collapse like American Puritanism collapsed into Unitarianism after the scandal of the witch trials.

RICHARD SANSOM:
Perhaps in the same way that Hitler believed he was improving the Reich [and the world] by destroying the Jews? This is an interesting take on things.

GARY:
I hope not because inside Germany and Nazi occupied territory, Hitler was amazingly successful. Also Stalin but not quite as solidly.

RICHARD SANSOM:
We try to destroy bacteria and viruses, therefore improving our health; is it the same principle? I do not think so.

GARY C. MOORE:
I hope not because we realize now we have created by this process bigger and badder bugs that no medicines can fight.

RICHARD SANSOM:
I really do not believe that the fanatical Muslim has improving Islam and the world in mind when he straps on explosives. I see it rather as the height of a vain sense of self importance – not a conscious step toward improving anything.

GARY:
It is precisely the lack of self importance in the community of faith that creates suicide bombers. Did you not read about the Israeli cabinet minister who personally interviewed two failed suicide bombers and found they were motivated by a complete despair of life, and that suicide bombing was their last hope for . . . What? The people who have a sense of self importance are the leaders in Islamic states, the best model of such being Saddam Husain. Most top dogs in Islam only make a public show of their faith that completely disappears in private. Al Jina and Attaturk are also prime examples. And think of the current ex-Communist leaders of former Muslim USSR states. There is much fundamental division in Islam and I have never understood why the CIA has never played upon it. They were very reluctant to deal with the nationalist problem in the USSR - Regan was an exception - I suppose because they were afraid of the power vacuum created by the fall of such a mighty state, or maybe just cowardice and stupidity. However, along with the corruption of the Party hierarchy - applicable to Islam - the economic collapse of the USSR - applicable to Islam and dramatically evident in the collapse of the Egyptian/Gaza wall and the Egyptians pushing the desperate Gazans back into Gaza - the nationalist splinter groups in the USSR was a key component of their collapse - most notably starting with Lithuania. There are both numerous nationalist - Kurdistan
- and religious sects - there are deep divisions even within the fanatical groups, not just Shia and Sunni, though that may prove to be enough. But no one once again brings this out.

RICHARD SANSOM:
People who do these kinds of things are simply deranged.

GARY C. MOORE:
No one is ever *simply deranged*.

RICHARD SANSOM:
There is much more to say on this subject, but it goes far afield from my interest – at least for now.

 RICHARD SANSOM:
Gary, You say: *The whole thrust of philosophy and theoretical science until the mid 20th century -- maybe – has been based on the solid perfection of logic and mathematics as a guarantee of truth.* I am surprised that you lump philosophy and science together, since they are [often] seen as pursuing very different objectives. Philosophy is something entirely of the mind; science is the pursuit of understanding and predicting the physical universe. Of course one would say that science is done in the mind, but its concerns are outside the mind. Philosophy invents –*isms,* [e. g. –isms such as Realism, Instrumentalism, Relativism, Rationalism, Positivism, etc.] while science invents explanations of physical phenomenon. [As for *truth,* I don’t believe philosophers can actually agree on what that is!] The objectives are not the same. When I asked: *Who cares about perfection?* I was rhetorically claiming that  *perfection* is not the objective; it is an abstraction that is of the mind – only of the mind. What is cared about in technology and science is what works. Newton’s solar system works just fine for most applications; Einstein’s spacetime calculations of the motions of planets far too complicated to use in local space travel. [We do not need Riemann geometry to travel to Mars] Einstein was not concerned about *perfection, * but rather a better and more complete way of explaining the motion of bodies.

GARY. C. MOORE:
I get your point about philosophy but I think that relates to its general failure as fuzzy thinking. I mean *logic* in the fundamental sense of Wittgenstein or Russell where it can translate into a picture or mathematics, that is, as something sure and unquestionable, a point one can proceed from in confidence of never self-contradicting oneself. Such knowledge is *perfect*, that is, *never wrong or unsure of itse4lf*. This is what Descartes wanted with *cogito ergo sum*, a sure starting point - which proved to be filled with all sorts of unjustified presuppositions

RICHARD SANSOM:
Later you say that *the chief high lord marshal of Rationalism in the 20th century was Albert Einstein….* and stated his oft quoted God not playing dice remark. This is a good place to discuss Einstein a bit, relative to my point about *perfection. * In 1905 Einstein wrote a paper, which was an hypothesis, proposing that light was really a stream of particle-like quanta of energy. He proposed that one quantum of light gives up a single electron upon collision with metal – the photoelectric effect, for which he received a Nobel prize. Einstein was not out to find perfection, but rather to explain observed phenomena – that had actually been discovered by Hertz in 1887. R. A. Millikan set about to falsify Einstein’s concept, [since he doubted its truth] but ended up, after ten years of experimentation, in verifying it! Einstein’s *quantum* was different from Bohr’s *quantum* levels of the electron in an atom – but both dealt with the discreetness in certain aspects of matter and electromagnetism. Along came Heisenberg, who theorized that there is an inviolate uncertainty in determining all the attributes of subatomic particles, and it was this aspect of quantum physics that gave Einstein pause. Yes, he was a Rationalist, but he did not challenge quantum mechanics, per se, only the troubling Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle which, as interpreted by Bohr, brought pure chance into the matter. Einstein was a causal determinist – but was not a predictive determinist. He believed that for every effect there are causes, but agreed that predicting events in quantum physics was problematic, if not impossible. As for some folks using quantum physics to justify supernatural phenomenon, I am not familiar with such ideas; who does that?

The fact that perfection cannot obtain in mapping mathematics to some physicality does not remove a valid Idea of cause and effect – does it?

GARY C. MOORE:
What you say is correct. However, Einsteins remark, since it refers to *God* and he did not consider himself an atheist like Freud did, refers to an overall understating of the universe, something I do not think is cognitively possible if one truly is dependent upon observable results only. What you say about causative determinism is true, but such study is only motivated in science by its ability to make reliable but never *perfect* predictions. The lack not only of *perfection*, of a sound and universally applicable axiom, is constantly brought up in the newest reaches of astronomy where scientific investigation based on sound principles more and more achieve utterly unpredicted results. It is not that the principles were wrong - not at all - but that the *observed results* are far more complex than anyone imagined or could predict. What you say about Einstein, quantum theory, and Heisenberg is correct and I agree with you. *Prediction* should remain just that, an assumption of future results from presently known facts. On our side of the question is the need to acknowledge a great deal of ignorance and no reliance on a Gods view of things where someone like Einstein can make statements about things he cannot visually observe and therefore cannot know about.

     On Bohrs side of the question, making *uncertainty* into a principle of physical reality itself is very disturbing and is unjustified for the same reason Einsteins Godlike point of view is unjustified. Our knowledge is small, our ignorance is great. This is purely observable results, no theoretical fish net catching of metaphysical unquantifiables in the absolute nothing. But if one makes *uncertainty* a principle of physical reality itself like mass and speed, then *anything goes*, and this is where supernatural speculation, of course, comes in. But if *uncertainty* is simply a *giving notice* of the finitude of human perception that cannot be got around, as I think Heisenberg intended, it does not at all indicate any *positive* state of reality as such. The supernatural interpretation of quantum theory was given in a tv series called DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE - allusion to Alice in Wonderland - where real scientists and pseudo scientists and non-physicist scientists all purportedly make statements in agreement - I feel when they saw the program itself they were outraged - but it was smoothly presented so that only when you tried to rationally tally results or noticed differences with what other quantum physicists had said else where - things an average viewer would pass over even if they knew - would you really feel you had been hoodwinked. With the same intent as religion, it promises you everything and actually gives you nothing. RICHARD SANSOM:The fact that perfection cannot obtain in mapping mathematics to some physicality does not remove a valid Idea of cause and effect – does it?

GARY C. MOORE:
Its reliability is its sole justification. *It has always happened that way in the past so we expect it to continue to act that way in the future*. It is simply experience and not a description of a state of being. There is nothing in an object to identity as *cause* and nothing to identify as *effect*. There are much better ways to describe the process and those terms can only be misleading, refering back to an outdated Rationalist philosophy I do not accept the assertion that the belief in cause-effect is the product of induction. and I agree with Popper that induction is not proof. Above you say that *Its reliability is its sole justification. * I do not see reliability [induction] having much to do with this issue – and by this issue I mean the means to establish the verity of some scientific theory, except only in the Popperian sense that one falsification is sufficient to derail a theory. The scientist, or the thinking person, does not believe that the sun appears regularly because it apparently always has, but believes it because of the physics involved in its motion. You say that *there are much better ways to describe the process….* What are they? As for your remark that *For instance, it is more effective to consider how a circle is actually thought. Considering such is precisely what created calculus which exposes the actual lack of perfection on the circle even in our thoughts.* I disagree that this is the origin of the calculus. The calculus was invented to investigate various characteristics of curves and two dimensional surfaces. Newton and Leibniz both came up with techniques for finding the area beneath complex curves and the slope, or differential at points on a curve. Newton called his integral calculus fluxions, while Leibniz used the commonly accepted term. But in either case, calculus was developed as t tool to find some numerical answer, and had nothing to do with proving or disproving something about perfection. I have the feeling that if either of them, or even Euler, was asked whether or not they were concerned with perfection they would look puzzled and claim that they were interested in procedures and answers – not arcane ontological queries. You say: *In the history of science it is always the breakdown of theoretical models at some point that makes experience demand a new theory.*

RICHARD SANSOM:
Not necessarily so. Nothing of Newton’s law F=MA broke down since in its original form it was F=d(mv)/dt -- i. e. force equals the time derivative of momentum. F=MA is a corruption, meaning that Newton meant to say F=M dv/dt. When mass is included in the derivative nothing changes between Newton’s and Einstein’s formulations of Force. This means that Einstein was not so much overturning Newton, a *breakdown in theoretical models* as much as an interpretation of what the deeper phenomenology is. When I gave my opinion as to the Neanderthal man’s technological stasis,[for over a hundred thousand years] you asked *How can you make such judgments?* Well, I make them based on what I read dealing with the long period of Neanderthal man doing virtually nothing in the way of tool progress. But regarding my belief dealing with Homo sapiens acquisition of what I call *causal ability* this is a speculation on my part – not a *judgment.*

Your acceptance of Hume’s ideas about causality are in the same boat – your beliefs. As for your comments on Islam and what is going on with suicide bombers, etc. I can only say little more than I have. I do not understand their psychology or motives. As for your saying that *No one is ever simply deranged.* Would you then say that they are complicatedly deranged? I added *simply* merely for emphasis. IMO, anyone who blows themselves up, given the biological imperative of living all organisms seem to possess, is deranged – simply or otherwise. As for the act of the suicide bomber as a last hope for….. What? If it is any kind of hope, for me such a hope coupled with suicide is prima facie evidence of derangement, since hope is an emotional connection with the future. It they are committing suicide to find paradise then they are stupidly deranged. I said that the suicide bomber had a vain sense of self importance since if they are doing it to change the world, or to further the cause of Islam, that seems like self importance to me. Regards, Richard