David Hume

Day 3571, The origin of ideas.

Daily picture, Quotes

David Hume

Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Section 2: The origin of ideas

Everyone will freely admit that the perceptions of the mind when a man Ÿfeels the pain of excessive heat or the pleasure of moderate warmth are considerably unlike what he feels when he later Ÿremembers this sensation or earlier Ÿlooks forward to it in his imagination. Memory and imagination may mimic or copy the perceptions of the senses, but they can’t create a perception that has as much force and vivacity as the one they are copying. Even when they operate with greatest vigour, the most we will say is that they represent their object so vividly that we could almost say we feel or see it. Except when the mind is out of order because of disease or madness, memory and imagination can never be so lively as to create perceptions that are indistinguishable from the ones we have in seeing or feeling. The most lively thought is still dimmer than the dullest sensation.   

A similar distinction runs through all the other perceptions of the mind. A real fit of anger is very different from merely thinking of that emotion. If you tell me that someone is in love, I understand your meaning and form a correct conception of the state he is in; but I would never mistake that conception for the turmoil of actually being in love! When we think back on our past sensations and feelings, our thought is a faithful mirror that copies
its objects truly; but it does so in colours that are fainter and more washed-out than those in which our original perceptions were clothed. To tell one from the other you don’t need careful thought or philosophical ability.

So we can divide the mind’s perceptions into two classes, on the basis of their different degrees of force and vivacity. The less forcible and lively are commonly called ‘thoughts’ or ‘ideas’. The others have no name in our language or in most others, presumably because we don’t need a general label for them except when we are doing
philosophy. Let us, then, take the liberty of calling them ‘impressions’, using that word in a slightly unusual sense. By the term ‘impression’, then, I mean all our more lively perceptions when we hear or see or feel or love or hate or desire or will. These are to be distinguished from ideas, which are the fainter perceptions of which we are conscious
when we reflect on our impressions.

Day 880, climate chance.

., Day's pictures, Haiku, Philosophy, Poetry

Day 880-1

A barer of life

broke at the end of summer

gathering some rain.

 

Taking away the mystery of understanding.

David Hume wrote in his famous book “an enquiry concerning human understanding” that the things we think about are made of the things we have seen earlier. Like the golden mountain we can imagine, it’s made of the gold and a mountain we have seen before. The book goes mush deeper than this and is recognized as an important book in the world of philosophy. I don’t do it justice by highlighting this particular idea and taking it out of its context, but still I do.

Have you ever thought about where your thoughts come from? Do they just appear? Does something in you make those thoughts out of nothing? Where were your thought that you have now when you were 5 years old? Do we collect the parts of our thoughts over time? Are we just combining bits and pieces, things we gathered, into our thoughts?

I think it is difficult to be an original thinker. No matter what we do we have to use the things we learned to form our own thoughts and only the exceptional person can combine the things he or she has learned into something truly original. It is not for nothing that thinkers like Plato or Aristoteles are still studied. They had drawn such profound conclusions from their experiences that hardly anybody since has come close to them.

If I look around in the bookstore or at social media, it seems that everybody has an opinion and often put it on the same level as …someone that has made it its life work. Climate chance springs to mind as an obvious example where so many people seem to now the answer where even the experts struggle and work hard to understand it and find an answer. As if they, the opinionated modern man, know the answer without the experience necessary.

We can not imagine a golden mountain without seeing a mountain and gold beforehand, the opinionated modern man can dismiss climate change without ever study biogeochemical cycles, ecological and agroecological systems, human-environment interactions. Do does people question there dentist or car mechanic with the same certainty?

Its humility we need, I don’t know anything about climate change so I trust the people that do just like I listen to my doctor or trust Hume more than myself if he talks about our mind.

What a peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we call ‘thought’.
David Hume

Day 700, Treatise of human nature.

Day's pictures, Philosophy, Poetry

Day 700-1

We suppose to learn, our synapses do fire.

They shoot to make, to pave the way.

Information contained or lost in time.

A spark, an insight that turns away.

Overcrowded, congested, worn down your choked.

Start training does neurons, cleanup your mind

Fire away at does old rusted anchors.

Cut that chain, make room for your life.

Because to be is to think, like a motion in time.

Not to get stuck in one place, forgotten to learn.

 

Here is something to rattle does rusted synapses in your brain. One of the classic books in philosophy that still is useful today and abstract enough to make you think and thus train your brain. You can download the book for free on many places or buy a used one for a couple of dollars online r at your local used bookstore.

TREATISE OF HUMAN NATURE
By David Hume
Book I: The understanding

Section 1: The origin of our ideas
All the perceptions of the human mind fall into two distinct kinds, which I shall call
‘impressions’ and ‘ideas’. These differ in the degrees of force and liveliness with which
they strike upon the mind and make their way into our thought or consciousness. The
perceptions that enter with most force and violence we may name ‘impressions’; and
under this name I bring all our sensations, passions, and emotions, as they make their first appearance in the soul [= ‘mind’; no religious implications]. By ‘ideas’ I mean the faint images of the others in thinking and reasoning: for example, all the perceptions aroused by your reading this book – apart from perceptions arising from sight and touch, and apart from the immediate pleasure or uneasiness your reading may cause in you. I don’t think I need to say much to explain this distinction: everyone will readily perceive for himself the difference between feeling (·impressions·) and thinking (·ideas·). The usual degrees of intensity· of these are easily distinguished, though there may be particular instances where they come close to one another. Thus, in sleep, in a fever, in madness, or in any very violent emotions of soul, our ideas may approach to our impressions: as on the other hand it sometimes happens that our impressions are so faint and low that we can’t distinguish them from our ideas. But although they are fairly similar in a few cases, they are in general so very different that no-one can hesitate to classify them as different and to give to each a special name to mark the difference. [Throughout this work, ‘name’ is often used to cover not only proper names but also general terms such as ‘idea’.]

Read more here

A Treatise of Human Nature (1738–40) is a book by Scottish philosopher David Hume, considered by many to be Hume’s most important work and one of the most influential works in the history of philosophy.The Treatise is a classic statement of philosophical empiricism, skepticism, and naturalism. In the introduction Hume presents the idea of placing all science and philosophy on a novel foundation: namely, an empirical investigation into human nature. Impressed by Isaac Newton’s achievements in the physical sciences, Hume sought to introduce the same experimental method of reasoning into the study of human psychology, with the aim of discovering the “extent and force of human understanding”. Against the philosophical rationalists, Hume argues that passion rather than reason governs human behaviour. He introduces the famous problem of induction, arguing that inductive reasoning and our beliefs regarding cause and effect cannot be justified by reason; instead, our faith in induction and causation is the result of mental habit and custom. Hume defends a sentimentalist account of morality, arguing that ethics is based on sentiment and passion rather than reason, and famously declaring that “reason is, and ought only to be the slave to the passions”. Hume also offers a skeptical theory of personal identity and a compatibilist account of free will.

Read more at wikipedia.