Status Updates From An Enquiry Concerning Human...

Note 6/n:
situate my lack an idea of necessary connexion within Hume's epistemology. Millican explains to me that Hume often replaces the term 'necessary connexion' with just 'connexion', indicating that the key idea whose source he is seeking is not strictly necessary connexion, but the broader notion of connexion in general.

Note 5/n:
etc. Necessary connexion does NOT occur in the economic and social world, e.g., inflation from an expansion of the money supply, mean-reversion to intrinsic value of mispriced securities, default of a borrower with a shit DSCR, etc. Hence I certainly don't have an idea of necessary connexion in the latter world - my thoughts on this are very vague, but in a hazy sense, I was wrestling with how to ...

Note 4/n:
of dementia, or the simple observation that I cannot direct the organs in my body. The mind takes a convenient cognitive shortcut by forgetting this last point.

Also, Millican somewhat addresses 1 of the lingering thoughts I have. I observe that necessary connexion nearly always only occurs in the natural world, e.g. the collision of billiard balls, the free-fall of objects, heat resulting from a flame,...

Note 3/n:
NO! Again, we merely observe contiguity in space and priority in time. We only observe 2 constantly conjoined events: i) The order of my will, ii) The subsequent obedience of my body. We never observe the causal glue between i) and ii). I, of course, can certainly conceive of a state where ii) does not follow from i): which is obviously observed in reality! - in the case of a paralysed man, or a patient ...

Note 2/n:
also the essence of the universe - this essence flows through and directs all things in the universe. It is a reasonable hypothesis that this consciousness of the will - that when my will directs my limbs, they immediately move accordingly; when my will organizes the faculties of my mind, it obeys - may very well be the impression that grants us the idea of necessary connexion.

But according to Hume, ...

Note 1/n:
This exploration of whether our idea of necessary connexion originates from our intimate consciousness of our will/ inner sentiment is ... unbelievably Schopenhauerian, and I am surprised that no one, not even Millican's notes, points this out. (According to Schopenhauer's exciting philosophy) It is a universal experience that, when we look deep within ourselves, we discover not only our own essence, but...

Note 2/2:

certainly doesn't state clearly anywhere in the Treatise or the Enquiry, whether he thinks i) or ii), and idk why. I would've thought it a tremendously important point to make clear.

Note 1/2:
As of now, I still don't know whether Hume thought: i) that necessary connexion does NOT exist AT ALL, ii) he allowed for the existence of necessary connexion, it's just that we can never know the necessary connexion of a cause and its effects, because we never directly observe necessary connexion. Due to the copy principle, whatever we never experience, we never have an idea of.

To my knowledge, he ...

Note n/n:
rigorous work that WAS available in the 18th century, namely, the labourious, borderline autistic analysis of corn prices that Smith later did. All of Hume's economics was just a priori reasoning.

Note 5/n:
I also find it unpalatable that Hume, the great empiricist, devoted no empirical evidence to support his economic essays. No signs of even basic empirical economic analysis were present, e.g. simple observations of the inflation rate, the unemployment rate, or the size of the money supply. These aggregate statistics did not exist in Hume's time, to be fair, but he did not even take the effort to do the ...

Note 4/n:
buttons' (i.e., common sense) to save them from drawing downright erroneous conclusions, and they push on their subtile reasonings.

So! I guess all is fair. Since Hume himself, being an empiricist trying to save human thought from sophistry and illusion, clearly committed to the abstruse philosophy! Modern empiricists are clearly a hundred times more abstruse than Hume.

Note 3/n:
I genuinely believe they do for the most part, save when they be swayed by inevitable personal biases, which happens to the best of us) - but it is folk wisdom now among practitioners that the highly advanced econometric techniques of today are dubious in predictive power. Hume himself addresses this in Section 1: that the real practical dangers of the abstruse philosophers is that they have no 'safety ...

Note 2/n:
speculations and dogma; but now, the word 'empirical' in modern econ is all about sophisticated yet ultimately abstract and far-fetched techniques to study economic phenomena, the predictive power of which remains highly debatable and even scoffed upon by practitioners and operators of markets. I highly respect modern empiricists' (I can only speak for economics) commitment to only follow the data (which...

Note 1/n:
Some meta thoughts:
It is ironic that the great philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, Hume being arguably the spearhead of this movement, advocated for empiricism as a grounded scaffolding to study the natural world, drawing conclusions only from data, evidence and observed experience, which fundamentally shifts us away from 'sophistry and illusion' - i.e. rationalistic, abstract, unfalsifiable ...

Note n/n:

But then, what is the foundation of why we identified custom itself that led Hume to causally infer custom? It is now obvious that this is a painful ad infinitum chain of probing that must eventually lead to a BELIEF - that 'custom connects all our causal reasonings'. This belief is but a leap of faith. I have no reason to particularly favour Hume's belief over, say, a rationalist philosopher's belief.

Note 4/n:
itself? Hume observes a phenomenon of the human mind (that we constantly ascribe causes and effects) and he labels a cause to this phenomenon - custom! Why should I hold much faith for Hume's causal identification? I am now very much sceptical of judgments of cause and effect.

We could say that it was custom itself that led Hume to causally infer custom as the driving force of our causal reasonings.

Note 3/n:
cause and effect. Well, Hume comments that our reasonings of effects don't flow logically from observations of causes - they are just connected by custom. And he says that he posits no underlying cause as to why custom operates the way it does in the human mind - this is just a factual observation of human nature. I agree with this, of course.

But is this identification of *custom* not causal reasoning ...

Note 2/n:
*belief* (in other words, ALL people must hold SOME beliefs). Hume considers a study of the nature of belief to be a digression from the core study of epistemology already. For all intents and purposes, we've concluded our epistemological journey.

Ironically, Hume's own commentary on *ad infinitum* led me to find some problems with his identification of custom as the architecture of our reasonings of ...