Classics and the Western Canon discussion

Hume says “It is evident...”

Is it clear what is evident (and what is not)? (Hint: to me, it's not. If it is to you, please explain.)

And do we all agree that it is indeed evident?

According to Professor Millican, it certainly wasn’t clear to Locke, who (Essay, II.xxxiii. 4-7) “had criticized the association of ideas as irrational and even akin to madness...Hume aims to overturn this traditional view.”

And if all our thoughts are connected, and our thoughts or ideas “introduce each other with a certain degree of method and regularity,” then throughout our life we only have one ongoing sequence of thought, and the thoughts we are having now are directly connected, through resemblance, contiguity, or cause or effect, with the thoughts we had on the first day of junior high school. Isn’t this a necessary conclusion to draw from his evident position?

And how could this chain ever start if every thought has to arise from some other thought?

Was I wrong to think that this section deserved its own thread?

"Connectedness" reminds me of this scene:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RldH...

Everyman wrote: "Hume says “It is evident...”

Is it clear what is evident (and what is not)? (Hint: to me, it's not. If it is to you, please explain.)

And do we all agree that it is indeed evident?

According to ..."

Is anything about what Plato writes "evident"?

What does "evident" mean in Hume? In the epistemology of knowledge?

Any thing beyond being capable of "being perceived or discerned"? Does evident here necessarily imply "obvious"?

What is "categorization"? Is it ever other than the imposition of human rules upon "information"? Or should one say categorization is the imposition (mapping?) of collections of impressions upon impressions, such as deciding whether to classify something as living or nonliving, as plant or animal, as male or female, as good or evil, as hot or cold, true or false, ....?

I guess this section was too short. Certainly the next section seems to follow a new chain of reasoning. One might even ask.. is there a connexion?

But to your opening point, it seems like it's based on a verbal misunderstanding. He doesn't mean all our thoughts are connected, one after another, another to the next "back to junior high," as you say. "Every thought," as in, any thought you think.
Any given chain of thought you trace, the thoughts will be connected in one of three ways. And then he says, I don't offer to prove this, but the more you try it out, the more you will see I am right.

I was struck by this passage:

Even in our wildest daydreams and night dreams we shall find, if we think about it, that the imagination doesn’t entirely run wild,

To Hume's point, this passage also connected me, by resemblance of dream states, of Republic 9.571c in which Socrates explains that when a person is asleep their reason is also asleep and their dreams are therefore unrestrained and uninhibited.

As a thought experiment, does this mean if a person was born and raised in a perfect, 6 sided all white 10' by 10' cube with no outside contact, would their dreams only be limited to what they can do in that cube, i.e., sit in the cube, stand in the cube, jog in place in the cube, etc.? Would they be able to dream of floating or flying in some imagined environment other than the cube? What about other objects or people?

I guess I am not getting in a clear sense that Hume acknowledges or is denying that our ideas can build upon experience or, as has often the case where science fiction inspired real science, experiences are seemingly built upon imagination. I suppose a case could be made that we conceive of going to the Moon simply because we stand here on Earth. And we are familiar with the concept of gravity as well as waves in a body of water, why not gravity waves? Why not X waves?

Maybe I am not looking deeply enough to see what Hume is getting at here?

This section was too short! I wanted to read more about it because I was surprised to read here, a century before Freud, the free association of ideas that is used in psychoanalysis. The unconscious reason that connects one idea and another is one of the main thing studied in this discipline. In line with what David says about Plato, "their reason is also asleep and their dreams are therefore unrestrained and uninhibited," psychoanalysis also studies dreams not as a wild and random phenomenon, but as a fantasy of unconscious desires that can emerge when reason and logic is asleep. I'm discovering Hume as an early psychologist; I'm also reading Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, an I was surprised to find an early sketch of the theory of evolution also!

I think my high school Physics teacher taught us this lesson either without explaining it to us, or left out too much to appreciate the full impact.

In our very first lab, he split us into groups of two or three and gave each group a shoebox sealed up with tape that contained some object taped inside and challenged us to determine what it was. If we guessed correctly he would open the box. The groups performed all sorts of manipulations on the box to try to guess what was inside; shaking it, weighing it, dropping it flat on a table, tilting it this way and that, setting it close to magnets to see if they stuck, etc. According to the teacher, nobody guessed correctly.

To our credit though, and this being part of the lesson, all the guesses were of things at least one person in each group had experience with, or things "similar to" other things they had experience with. There were guesses for chalkboard erasers, pieces of chalk, some kind of bouncy ball, something very light, like a piece of paper or a feather. One girl guessed it was a hunk of velveeta cheese wrapped in plastic. When asked why she said she liked cheese and when she shook the box it hit the sides of the box like cheese would, but it had to be wrapped in plastic otherwise it would get all dried out and spoil. Of course since this lab occurred in the early 80's nobody guessed cell phone battery, CD or DVD, or USB sticks, or wireless earbuds.

Then the teacher picked up one of the boxes and asked the group it belonged to if it could be a "bidget", a word he not so obvious to us at the time, made up by replacing the W in widget with a B, We did not know if it was something he made up or something real that we had not heard about yet. When we asked him, how would we know if it was a bidget he just smiled and asked us back, "how could you know?", emphasizing the could. Then our brains began to hurt and the bell for the next class rang and that was the end of the lesson to haunt us for the rest of our lives because he refused to reveal the contents of the boxes.

As an aside, it is curious to note that even the word, "bidget" was made up from another word he had experience with and we did not. But we soon did because in the many lectures to follow, he commonly used "widgets" to describe general objects with various properties that we plugged into various Newtonian formulas. But to this day, with all of my experience of bidgets, I still don't know what they are. :)

Patrice wrote: "can people blind since birth dream in color?"

How can they know whether they are dreaming in color?

David wrote: "As a thought experiment, does this mean if a person was born and raised in a perfect, 6 sided all white 10' by 10' cube with no outside contact,..."

That's an excellent question. I have no idea what the answer is.

Everyman wrote: "David wrote: "As a thought experiment, does this mean if a person was born and raised in a perfect, 6 sided all white 10' by 10' cube with no outside contact,..."

That's an excellent question. I h..."

How? The last time I checked, a baby still had to be born, even if by Cesarean section or other such means, rather than squeezing through a rather narrow exit, and generally had already spent a number of months in a rather unique, albeit universal, set of conditions. All that, even before imagining or accomplishing white cube maturation.

Patrice wrote: "
the most wrong idea here is that all languages have the same ideas. i have a friend who owns a translation business with on line translators throughout the world. she says its difficult because not every culture has the same words or concepts. for instance, Bhutan has no word for democracy. it does not exist for them. Actually, we dont have a word for it either, we had to borrow the word from Greek.
..."

Right. I have a hard time expressing my thoughts I originally conceived in English to my Korean speaking husband when the term doesn't exist in Korean or vice versa. This is especially deeply felt whenever I find a good Korean poem and try to convey it to my English friends and vice versa. Sometimes there are just no corresponding words.
However, when I read this part about language, I was reminded of Chomsky's Universal Language theory. Maybe what Hume was trying to point out was not the content that is universal in every language but the way the content of speech is connected (and thus how the ideas reflected in the speech is connected)?

Nemo wrote: ""Connectedness" reminds me of this scene:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RldH..."

This is a great show. I wonder what Hume would have thought of the connectedness in the age of artificial intelligence?

Borum wrote: "Nemo wrote: ""Connectedness" reminds me of this scene:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RldH..."

This is a great show. I wonder what Hume would have thought of the connectedness in the age of ..."

The AI in that show has problem deciding what is significant. It can find patterns and similarities (connectedness) between events and people, but it cannot determine what is significant and what is not. Chomsky would say that an AI may be smart enough to talk like a human being, but it never knows what it is talking about.

Nemo wrote: "Borum wrote: "Nemo wrote: ""Connectedness" reminds me of this scene:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RldH..."


The AI in that show has problem deciding what is significant. It can find patterns and similarities (connectedness) between events and people, but it cannot determine what is significant and what is not. Chomsky would say that an AI may be smart enough to talk like a human being, but it never knows what it is talking about. ..."

That reminds me of the Microsoft's chatbot Tay. What a faux-pas.

Christopher wrote: "But to your opening point, it seems like it's based on a verbal misunderstanding. He doesn't mean all our thoughts are connected, one after another, another to the next "back to junior high," as you say. "Every thought," as in, any thought you think."

OK, so all of our thoughts aren't connected in one unbroken chain. But every thought is connected to some earlier thought. And eventually we get to our very earliest thoughts. Which is to say that every chain of thought must be connected in some way back to junior high. Because apparently a new chain of thought can't just arise out of nothing.

I was going to argue that we have thoughts all the time that rise completely unbidden, as Patrice was demonstrating above, but it's true that even those unbidden thoughts aren't entirely new and "imaginative." They may not be connected via "resemblance, contiguity, or cause and effect" to the thought just prior (trying to read Hume), but they are all connected to some earlier experience we've had. David's story from physics class seems to illustrate this perfectly. And also makes me feel like my head might explode.

I would have to really play with this for awhile to decide whether I think Hume's three types of connection are adequate. Has anyone else tried this out?

Everyman wrote: "Hume says “It is evident...”

Is it clear what is evident (and what is not)? (Hint: to me, it's not. If it is to you, please explain.)

And do we all agree that it is indeed evident?

According to ..."


The thing that came to my mind with connections was the humble apple. For many of us, the connection would be with the fruit - perhaps other fruits or what it tastes like/feels like etc etc

But now it would also be with the brand and its various tech components.

New association of ideas in this fashion?