Isaac Chan’s Reviews > An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding > Status Update

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 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.