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

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 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 ...

Note 2/2:
great danger of the abstruse philosophy: that it can stray far from the logic of real life, cuz it has no common sense to rein it in. So this must mean that Hume thinks that his empiricism is not remote from common life and experience, then! Indeed, this is slightly disingenuous of Hume imo: for he is a champion of the abstruse philosophy himself, and his doctrine of skepticism is hardly common-sense.

Note 1/2:
Hume's first refutation of Malebranche's occasionalism is telling - it tells me that he thinks that common sense is a sufficient argument to refute a philosophical argument (Malebranche's philosophy being, if I understand it correctly, that God is constantly creating, willing, and moving all objects in the universe - not an unappealing theory to me).

Indeed, Hume had warned in Section 1 that this is a ...

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 ...