Status Updates From تحقيق في الذهن البشري

Note n/n:
other editors by miles. He put in the effort to guide the reader section by section, and his notes are self-referencing.

No wonder I couldn't understand 'On liberty' and the Nicomachean ethics.

Note 5/n:
'Nicomachean ethics'. The explanatory notes and introduction by Millican are heads and shoulders above the Mill book. This is unacceptable - I would've thought OWC had a central editor committee that ensures consistent quality across all their books. The Enquiry is much shorter than the Mill and the Aristotle volumes which allows for more room for expert commentary, but still, Millican outshines the...

Note 4/n:
attribute a breakdown in some expected factor return pattern (e.g. the value factor earning me a negative excess return in a given year) to a breakdown in the uniform rule, by chance - I don't usually assume a contrary cause, like value stocks suddenly becoming less risky than growth stocks.

Finally, I compared my copies of Oxford World's Classics 'Enquiry', 'On liberty and other essays' and ...

Note 3/n:
objects) and thus the doctrine of necessity. I get it.

I'm not sure if I agree with Hume's argument that the vulgar commonly attribute uncertainty in events to contingency in the causes, whereas philosophers know that they are due to contrariety in the causes. When I see the clock stopping, yes I assume some defect (a contrary cause); but in the uncertain spheres like the financial markets, I commonly ...

Note 2/n:
explain/ predict empirical phenomena, and not wasting our time with the futile endeavour of speculating about the underlying metaphysics of things.

Humorously, I am currently unsure why Hume has chosen to go into this multi-page ramble about the uniformity of human nature, just to argue that people indeed have become accustomed to human nature's uniformity (as they have to the uniformity of other ...

Note 1/n:
I feel indignant at Hume now, as he labels the vulgar as 'those who take things at first appearances' (I recall this accusation of the vulgar in the Treatise as well) - because zooming out, I feel like there's no conceptual difference between the 'vulgar' and instrumentalists, of which Hume subscribed to. They are both about accepting events and phenomena as they ARE and as they pertain as tools to ...

Note n/n:
Indeed, it was Alex O'Connor's insight to me that one's actions follows from one's will, but one's will IS causally determined, that convinced me of determinism.

Note 5/n:
since it does not matter whether one's will is causally determined. Millican teaches that Hume follows Hobbes and I remain to read how he does so: I also now recall that he touches on liberty and necessity at the tail end of the 'Abstract'. I can imagine that Hume will proceed as follows: that we constantly observe our actions following our will, so custom gives us the idea of liberty. Something like that.

Note 4/n:
anything that Wittgenstein said new, then?

Furthermore, Millican does me a great favour yet again: I would not have known that Hume followed Hobbes in the compatibilist theory, if it were not for Millican. Hobbes posited compatibilism in Leviathan using a somewhat cheap linguistic hack: if you define liberty as 'One's actions being directed according to one's will', then this is obviously compatibilist ...

Note 3/n:
broader instances in the past. I do not imagine a small child would infer that a positive earnings announcement CAUSES a drop in the stock price, just by observing one such instance (because the positive earnings were below the whisper number).

Hume anticipates Wittgenstein here by commenting that much disagreement in philosophy stems from ambiguity of the definitions of the terms we use. So, how is ...

Note 2/n:
we often ascribe causation irl after just observing ONE instance. In fact this is the root of much bad thinking in our politics, in our work, in our investing, and much of daily life. I myself have done this many times in the past. How do you explain this phenomenon then, in the strictly positive sphere?

This can only be explained if the singular instances we observed were derivations of similar, ...

Note 1/n:
I simply must challenge Hume on 1 point now: he says that custom is necessarily, positively how we have an idea of causation. He says the mind only gets an idea of causation after it observes a long course of uniform experience. From what I can read, it is not just normative that we should not infer causation from a single instance - he says that this is positively so.

But this is clearly not the case:

Note 5/n:
system, custom alone can create an internal impression that imprints an idea.

Finally, Hume maintains that a cause = if the 1st object had not been, the 2nd never had existed. This jives exactly with that Goodfellows episode 'The counterfactual show' that I watched in 2024, where I learned the profound concept from Stephen Kotkin that all causal explanations are counterfactual arguments BY DEFINITION.

Note 4/n:
capital which caused its trade deficit? I thought that the temporal priority of many events in real life are highly ambiguous but no one can doubt that they are causally intertwined. Thus I concur with Hume to drop this condition of temporal priority.

Millican's commentary that Hume had 'finally tracked down the impression of necessary connexion' also confuses me: I did not know that, within Hume's ...

Note 3/n:
I see from my review of the 'Abstract' that my June 2025 self had thought that priority in time is a pretty weak condition: I used the example of the US's strong trade deficit and corresponding capital surplus. Which one was prior in time? Did the US's relentless import purchases over the past several decades fuel its capital surplus, or did the US's highly attractive financial markets attract global ...

Note 2/n:
'necessary connexion'.

A further thought on Hume's 2 famous definitions of a cause (also refer to page xlv in the intro). Millican teaches me that in the Treatise, Hume had insisted that a cause must be contiguous with its effect as well as temporally prior, but he had dropped the latter condition from the Enquiry. (The 2 definitions in the Enquiry both concern themselves only with contiguity in space.)

Note 1/n:
Revisiting my review of the 'Abstract' this morning was so annoying - it revealed how many details I had forgotten and had missed in the Enquiry. Firstly, Hume had mentioned the terms 'power' and 'force' (in relation to necessary connexion) multiple times in the Abstract, so I should NOT have found those terms foreign in my current reading of the Enquiry, nor should I have not known what he means by ...

Note 5/n:
that this constant conjunction stops completely.

Again, Hume leaves his metaphysics of causation unclear: whether he thinks there ARE underlying causes at all, or just that the mind can never directly observe underlying causes.

Note 4/n:
to and thus harvest the long-run US equity risk premium was initially borne out of a presumably deep understanding on the underlying causes of the equity premium (e.g. systematic market risk, disaster risk, risks to human capital, the longer I play the higher my chances of winning etc), but now Hume is telling me that all those causal inferences are merely post-hoc narratives. I can conceive of a state ...

Note 3/n:
of causation (which I do not understand, because I clearly find within myself an idea of causation). All causal inferences can only be assigned AFTER observing constant conjunction - the mind can never have an insight into the underlying causal forces with no prior experience. This is deeply unsettling to me (not to say that I have not been unsettled by Hume for years now): my decision to gain exposure ...

Note 2/n:
Berkeley lie on the instrumentalism spectrum - just that Berkeley was a strict/ hard instrumentalist - but Berkeley pushed this philosophy to a completely opposite view on God, compared to Hume. Berkeley's instrumentalist view of God's laws is very exciting to me.

Finally, Hume is basically saying that all our ideas of causation are post-hoc! We never directly observe causation, so we don't have an idea...

Note 1/n:
So, this 'instrumentalism' philosophy as embraced by Hume (who was deeply influenced by Newton) is exactly just the pool-player analogy advanced by Friedman in 'The methodology of positive economics', then. (It's also quite funny that both Friedman and Hume alluded to pool and billiards.) Note that Hume is generalizing instrumentalism to ALL causes in the world.

It is interesting that both Hume and ...