Most people have no trouble understanding what a “headless monster” is. Even though none of us ever physically interacted with one. But once you mention a concept such as “uncaused event” people are immediately confused. Even though these two concepts have quite a bit in common. Headless monster is a monster without a head. It’s a monster that has no head and this means that we do not see its head – we do not see a head associated with this monster. That’s how we KNOW that any particular monster has no head – by not seeing it. Our resident smartass would scream “SOLIPSISM!” He will tell us that just because we do not see something does not mean that that something does not exist. In this particular case, he will tell us that just because we do not see a head does not mean that there is no head. How can we be ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that this particular organism, this monster, has no head? For example, its head might simply be too small to be visible to the naked eye. We need to zoom in. Okay, we decide to give him a chance, so we use whatever means we have to get a closer look in order to test his claim. We do the experiment and we get a negative result: there is no head. Our smartass, however, is not willing to give up. He insists that the head might be even smaller than what we assumed so we need to zoom in further. Just to be sure. Okay, we give him another chance, we zoom in further, and once again, we get a negative result: there is no head. But the smartass won’t give up. He wants to keep zooming in. He’s never certain. He’s clearly afraid of being wrong. Like a paranoid person, or a hypochondriac, he is constantly worried about something – in his case, about being wrong. This is a paralyzing condition because without imposing a time-limit on your research (i.e. without establishing how long you’ll keep looking for evidence) you can never do anything else in your life other than do research. The effect is you spend more and more of your time doing research and less and less time taking action. All because you’re afraid of being a “solipsist”. As if there is such a thing as “absolute certainty”. It’s interesting that our smartass understands what a headless monster is but has trouble understanding what an uncaused event is. An uncaused event is simply some event A for which there is no some other event B which is causally related to it. In plain terms, it’s an event for which we see no cause. Words “cause” and “effect” are simply attributes we assign to those events that are in a specific relation (i.e. that have certain set of similarities and differences that represent what we call “causal relation”.) Our smartass thinks that the universe cannot function without such relations. Apparently, in his own little world, the universe is some kind of organism that must act in a certain way lest it die and disappear out of existence together with existence itself. Whatever that means. I am sure he “understands” what that means. If he thinks or feels he understands it, he must be understanding it.
Do I have to say that “uncaused event” is not the same as “self-caused event” or what is otherwise known as causa sui? The class of concepts that have the form self-[verb] are very tricky to deal with. On one hand, relations can exist only between two different things. A thing cannot be in relation with itself. It’s meaningless. On the other hand, self-relations, if not treated literally, can refer to relations between two different events that belong to the same category. For example, suicide is a form of self-relation – a self-destruction – that refers to one event from the category “self” destroying another event from the category “self” e.g. one’s brain destroying one’s body. I have no idea what self-causation can possibly mean. Either way, when I say “uncaused event” I mean any event that is literally not caused by any other event including itself (if that were somehow meaningful.) There is a breed of morons who think that if an event is not caused by some other event that it is caused by itself. This is just plain stupid. It betrays that they have no clue what casual relations are. And that they think that behind every event must be a cause. And that if there is no other event that is the cause of some event X that the event X is caused by itself.