Section 1: Nothing Happens without a Cause

Summation:

   Determinism means: While many events can happen potentially; only those events whose causes are sufficient to make them happen ever occur, and the only things which occur are those whose sufficient causes have manifested.

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   We agree that the physical world is deterministic. The behaviors of animals are different from the behaviors of stones or protons or colliding objects on an inclined plane; these behaviors are based on desire--psychological realities.

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   However, those psychological realities, while qualitatively distinct from physical phenomena in many ways, are also deterministic. (The donkey will want to walk this way 0r that way if and only if the causes sufficient to make it want to do so are present.)

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   Axiomatically: everything which happens has a cause.

   Our observations confirm that this rule applies to the behaviors--and the necessary desires in that chain of causation--of animals.

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   Why should it be otherwise?

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   The confusion comes from the fact that the physical causes of physical events are available to our observation; while the causes of desire and choice are internal to the mind of the creature doing the choosing and ultimately the acting and so they are invisible to us; but they must exist in the causal nexus of the world which always and everywhere follows this Universal law of Necessity.

   Furthermore, the factors which go into the making of a decision for an animal are rarely conscious factors in the mind of the animal, they are invisible to the actor himself what causes are sufficient to make him want and then to choose one course of action over another. Yet they must be there, and be sufficient to cause the animal to make whatever choice it makes.

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   It seems that things which do not happen are possible nonetheless, and this is true in a sense. it is NOT possible for a donkey to fly, but it WAS possible that he turned to the left instead of the right as we observed him to do. HOWEVER, what we mean when we say this is only that the factors which made him turn to the right were so trivial, and could easily be imagined to have been other than they were, that it is easy for us to imagine them having been different so that they would have caused him to turn in the other direction. The truth is that they were what they were, and being physical and external to the donkey, could not have been otherwise, as the whole of the physical world is subject to this Universal law of determinism, so in reality the donkey had no chance of ever turning the other way, and we would see that if we knew all the causes and understood them fully.

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In Short: The life of an animal and all its choices are determined by its genetic make-up, and the history of its environmental past and present and nothing else. The only alternative is that the donkey is a divine first-mover sometimes when it acts, and this goes against our understanding of the world and a Universal Principle of Necessary Cause.