He attended the University of Edinburgh at the unusually young age of twelve and left without graduating producing seminal texts in Western philosophy; A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), Enquiries concerning Human Understanding (1748), and Enquiries concerning the Principles of Morals (1751).
These books focused on developing a naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. His empiricism, theory of mind, personal identity, association of ideas and analysis of emotions and morality, along with scepticism of religion are foundational in philosophy and psychology.
Psychology
Hume’s insights are precursors to several modern psychological concepts. As a pure empiricist, he believed that all human knowledge arises from sensory experience, through 'impressions' and then 'ideas', which can be linked to how we process and interpret information, a cornerstone in cognitive psychology. His principle of association, where one idea naturally leads to another influenced later psychological theories of how thoughts and memories are interconnected.
He also studied the role of emotions in thought and moral judgment, which predates the now rich field of moral psychology. Moral distinctions for Hume are derived from feelings of pleasure and pain rather than intellectual reasoning, highlighting the importance of emotions in human behaviour and decision-making.
His scepticism about our ability to truly know causes and effects along with a careful analysis of inductive thinking has implications for how we understand and study the limitations of human behaviour and mental processes. This led him to question the idea of a permanent ‘self’, proposing instead that the self is a bundle of perceptions that change over time. This anticipates discussions in psychological fields about the nature and stability of the self-concept and identity.
Personal identity
It has a long pedigree, going back to Hume’s destruction of the Cartesian idea of the mind as separate from the body.
“I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist. Nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement. Thus we feign the continued existence of the perceptions of our senses, to remove the interruption; and run into the notion of a soul, and self, and substance, to disguise the variation.”
This was an astounding moment in philosophy and psychology, as it demolished dualism and most forms of established religion, opening up the mind up to study as something more examinable and intimately related to perception.
Hume’s idea that perception is primary and that we can never escape its presence, this bundle of perceptions, that constantly change, except when consciousness is lost in sleep. He focuses on the actual flow of experience, in the moment.
“I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist. nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.”
And so Hume rejects the idea of any cognitive subject beyond our perceptions, any underlying entity:
“Thus we feign the continued existence of the perceptions of our senses, to remove the interruption; and run into the notion of a soul, and self, and substance, to disguise the variation.”
There are many who have been inspired by this notion of personal identity as perceptual, fragmented and a process, rather than an identifiable essential self. Others have explored exactly what this perceptual process is, finding that it is not simple one of input but a complex predictive and anticipatory process.
Post-Darwinian theorists like Derek Parfitt and Galen Strawson built on Hume’s ideas to consolidate this idea of the brain and mind, defined as memories, personality and intentions. All we have are brain states, psychological and bodily continuity and need no additional ideas of subject, self or soul. Galen Strawson even dismisses the idea of the ‘storied-self’ seeing personal identity as episodic.
Daniel Dennett and goes further seeing the brain as evolved organ, with a fully intentional stance, operating through a predictive engine (AI) to produce changing drafts of consciousness, adding the use of language and memetics. Nick Chater argues for a flat mind, without the fictions of unconscious entities. Here we see a theory emerging that is sensitive to Bayesian ideas in AI and the success of Generative AI
In summary, Hume's empirical approach and skepticism about metaphysical explanations of the mind, along with his insights into human understanding and the self, resonate with these later thinkers, especially as AI begins to inform us about the mind.
Learning
Having never graduated and rejected by Edinburgh University for a Professorship, despite his reputation as the greatest living philosopher he was suspicious of academic teaching, famously stating in a letter to a friend “There is nothing to be learnt from a Professor, which is not to be met with in Books.” His suspicion of abstract religious and metaphysical speculation, divorced from empirical evidence, was also his hallmark.
“When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”
This appeal for a more tempered qualitative and sceptical approach to philosophy and psychology was to have a profound influence on post-Enlightenment thought and science.
Legacy
He is keen to assert the study of human nature and the mind as both the alpha and omega of his inquiries and point out the foolishness of stories, for example about miracles, that spread and take root in uneducated populations. In other words, his epistemology is entirely in line with the idea that the mind is a dynamic and fleeting phenomenon that evades capture through reflection and a general scepticism around abstract reason on the self, causality and induction.
Bibliography
Hume D. (1739). A Treatise of Human Nature. Of Personal Identity Selection from Book I, Part 4, Section 6.
Hume D. (1748) An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, edited by Tom. L. Beauchamp, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999.
No comments:
Post a Comment