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Reading David Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
David Hume thinks that all we can know are our own impressions, i.e. what our moment-to-moment experiences tell us. Funny thing, though: he thinks that no experience shows us one event causing another event. We only experience one thing happening, then another, and these sequences tend to display a lot of uniformity. So, if we have any legitimate idea of causality at all, it must just be that: regular patterns of conjoined events.
We discuss what Hume thinks this view implies for the free will question, belief in miracles, whether external objects are actually there, Seth’s experience of Towlie, and more.
Read with us: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9662.
End song: “Twitch” by by The MayTricks, from the 1994 album Happy Songs Will Bring You Down.
Five Stars after 100+ iTunes Ratings.
#1 by Thomas on December 16, 2010 - 3:53 pm
I can’t believe no one commented on this particular podcast. I’m listening to them in chronological order and I think what you three are doing here is awesome!
This discussion, however, was the first time that I have been exposed to a seemingly relatively concrete problem of existence to which I have not already been exposed in some manner as a non-philosophically trained but well-educated, culturally-attuned Westerner of the 21st Century. Namely, the fact that there is no way to rationally get at our understanding of causation; that causation necessitates the assumption (I saw some source liken it to a belief) that future events will conform to the past.
I was repeatedly reminded of the “arrow of time” in physics. My apologies to physicists for what follows. Most equations in physics are time neutral, and operate perfectly well even if you make time negative in every instance where it is a variable. However, our experience in the macro world indicates that time flows in one direction. Entropy is either like this or relates to it somehow. I’m sure I’m butchering the concepts, but an interested party can look it up quite easily.
To my brain, the likeness comes in in that Hume’s causation is something we read into the world because of our observations taken over the continuum of progressing time; because of the way we are able to observe the present, remember it as past, and apply such remembering to imaginings of the future. Causation is not, however, something we can boil down to a combination of empirical experiences and rational manipulations of those experiences. Similarly, the arrow of time is something we experience through our taking in of the present, which we store as memory and use to consider the future, yet it is something we have, thus far, been unable to come to an understanding of via our usual scientific process of making observations and rationally manipulating those observations in our imaginations to create equations representing theorems and laws and such. Both of these paradoxes seem to be related to the fact that we remember the past and imagine the future but seem to only “exist” in the present, for whatever that’s worth. Would an animal with no memory or power of imagination have any idea of causation or even of time? What does this mean about our relationship to time or the nature of time? Maybe Hume was actually alighting on some kind of form of the realization that time is at least partially a construct of human (and even animal) consciousness as opposed to some phenomenon which occurs in nature outside of consciousness.
Whatever…
…
Obviously, you (and Hume) spurred me to thought which is the highest compliment I can bestow. Keep up the good work!
#2 by Mark Linsenmayer on December 18, 2010 - 4:53 pm
Thanks, Thomas. We’ve got a bunch more on causality in the Schopenhauer episode (to be posted very soon).
#3 by Douglas on January 14, 2011 - 9:45 am
Just finished this–about 4 dog walks worth of chat! I hate being so late to the game.
This seems, so far, the only very crucial idea: determinism. It’s somehow hard for me to conceive of determinism as not making “causation” meaningful. Psychology seeks to determine behavioral causation. This seems to say (with Aristotle, right) that habituation starts and day one and determines your “outcome”. Perhaps this cannot be an “ultimate” causation but aren’t we thinking that habituation needs a cause (a repeated act or event or emotion, etc.) to engender it? Of course, I suppose the question then is that we can’t know the cause of the cause…and this may be where Hume says that search is fruitless to your living.
If we start to mix some thoughts that we determine are scientific…the amount of molecules are fixed and with dissipation in a current state they are released and re-used…with this kind of thinking (and blend in some Leibniz) does a molecule have an habitual “memory” (is memory only habit then)? This is a kind of Jungian thought re: collective unconscious.
Re: Belief in the unseen/unexperienced–doesn’t this idea give us the true power of communication? Words are also experience in this regard (2nd order/level). And if I experience these same words again and again then the words become believed and then they are hard to dislodge from my “customary” thinking.
Yikes.