laura@utcsstat.UUCP (Laura Creighton) (01/16/84)
Hello gang. I promised you lot this more than a week ago. Some people are getting impatient and asking me where it is. Well, it is nice to be appreciated, but... At any rate, it was not sloth that kept me from writing this sooner. Rather, it was a more serious problem -- I couldn't get the idea across. I have been ambushing people all week and giving them the current version of the presentation and I kept getting blank stares. At first, I thought that what was needed was a terrific introduction. So I did my best (that was the article on epistemology) and posted it. People claimed to understand the introduction. They still didn't understand Hume. I think, however, I amy have finally hit upon something. it is, however, as far as i know, unconventional. Thus the nit-pickers can go have a field day... If you can do a better job, will you please try? I have been trying to come up with a good way to do this all week... * * * Right, gang, enough excuses. How many people here know what a black hole is? (everybody had better be putting their hands up or this article isn't going to make any sense. If you don't know, check out a library.) Okay. They are rather wondrous things to think about. You get terrific science fiction out of black holes. They also make (or made -- I don't know if they are still making) excellent things to get a Masters or a Phd in theoretical physics about. You can do lots of research on the idea. Okay, so when a physicist is dealing with the idea of a black hole he is doing science, right? (again, you had better agree...) But what is a black hole? if you go off and read something about the subject you will find thge statement that "a black hole is a theoretical construct". Hmm. Whazzat? A "theoretical construct" is in this case something that the maths predict, but nobody has ever seen. Nobody has ever had a black hole in their lab to do experiements on. The thing that it is important to remember is that nobody is ever going to get one, either. Thus if you are doing research on a black hole, you are in a different position than somebody doing research on the moon. Nobody gets the moon in their lab either, but the possibility exists that one day you may get to go there and do some experiments. You don't get this chance with a black hole. Physicists are very good at coming up with theoretical constructs. (look -- I can believe 10 impossible things before breakfast!). Theoretical models of the atom are another example. you make a model which helps you explain the evidence. The better the model, the more evidence is matched. if there is lots of evidence left over, you try to build a better model. Nobody is going to get to take an atom apart and see the pieces -- atoms are too small. Nobody is going to get a black hole inside the lab (as opposed to getting the lab inside the black hole, which *is* possible) either. Still with me? Now, some people who haven't studied science haven't understood this notion of "theoretical constructs". they think that an electron is every bit as real as their car. they think that electrons really are little ping-pong balls that fly around a basketball that is the nucleus. Not that this is a good way to think about it, but that that is how it *is*. *Really* is. Really, really, really is. As in what you probably think of as 'real' in your day-to-day life -- objectively real. Okay, what Hume did was this. He asked the question "what is real"? how do we know that our arm is more real than our idea of a dragon? how do you figure out what is real? he came up with the conclusion: ideas are real. okay, so far, he and Descartes are in perfect agreement. now, according to Descartes, certain ideas are real ones (such as "I exist" and the principle of sufficient cause) and all of the rest of our ideas are based on our perceptions of these basic real ones. Hume said nothing doing. All you have is sense perceptions. Thats it. Poof. Nothing more. You have ideas about your sense perceptions, and ideas about your ideas about your sense perceptions, but the basic thing is sense perceptions. Every idea is a discrete representation of a sense perception in the mind. So what about the "I". Isn't that very basic? not according to Hume. the "I" is one of those theoretical constructs I was talking about earlier. it isn't objectively real -- it merely is useful as a model. Hold onto your hats, folks, i am going to try to prove to you that you do not exist... The memory stores sense impressions. So there are sense impressions and the memory of sense impressions. So what does one do? One posits an "I" that connects these memories together. This is called self-consciousness. Anything with a memory also has a self-conscious by this model. So where Descartes was able to say that animals cannot feel pain because they do not have a thinking mind, Hume cannot. Animals have a memory, therefore they have a self-conscious. (I actually think that it was Berkeley who went on about this, not Hume.) But the "I" is no more real than any other model. Useful, yes -- real no. Okay, but everybody believes that they have an "I". How come they believe in a non-existing thing? Well, according to Hume, it is because they aren't able to perceive the changes between the "I" of yesterday and the "I" of today. but you do say that "I am not the same person I was 12 years ago", so people do recognise that the "I" is not a permanent thing. if you really looked and really remembered you coiuld see that you are not the same person you were 10 minutes ago, either, but people don't think of themselves this way (unless they have just undergone a traumatic event) and they construct the unchanging "I" and believe in it very fiercely. Look, fool, you might be saying, all that proves is that people change, not that they *aren't*. I'm coming to that. What is change? It is a measurement of the differences between one thing at one time and the same thing at another time. but they aren't simulataneously present, right? So it is actually the measurement of the differences between something that is right now (ie something that you can perceive through sense impressions) and a memory of something, or of 2 memories. So what makes you say that the 2 things are the same thing? You cannot perceive them both at the same time, so you lose. What you have is made another theoretical construct -- the reality of the things out in the world. They aren't real either -- there is nothing but the sense impressions that you are getting now. Let me get rid of one other theoretical construct while I am at it. Remember Descartes "principle of sufficient cause"? Nothing comes from nothing? That is another theoretical construct. Suppose you were sitting close to a picket fence and watched a cat go by on the other side. You are very close to the fence and cannot see the whole cat at once -- indeed you cannot see the whole cat at all. What you see is a cat head. Pretty soon you see a cat tail. The cat walks back and forth on the other side. You get pretty good at seeing cat heads and then seeing cat tails. Eureka! you conclude: "cat heads cause cat tails!" What you are saying is that you are psychologically conditioned to expect cat tails after cat heads, so much so that if a Manx cat, which has no tail walked by on the other side of the fence you might go into hysterics waiting for the tail. We think that this is stupid or funny because we can see whole cats. We don't have to live on one side of a fence. BUT -- suppose that consciousness is the fence and it is impossible to see the whole world at once. We keep seeing it at one time and then at another time. We are thus psychologically conditioned to see effects following causes. Boy are we going to be surprised if there are any Manx cats out there. Moreover, if we find any headless cats we are going to find an effect without a cause. Perhaps the spontaneous generation of sub-atomic particles are headless cats. Onto God. God as the cause of the world is no good -- the world may be a headless cat. indeed, it is impossible to experice a world without god and a world with god at the same time. Therefore, no matter what you do you can never prove (or disprove) the existence of God. Hume can maintain his radical skepticism for his whole life. Laura Creighton utzoo!utcsstat!laura ps -- I am not the great authority on black holes. If you have questions about them, ask somebody else, 'cause I am not a wonderful source of information about them.
rpw3@fortune.UUCP (01/20/84)
#R:utcsstat:-166600:fortune:21900007:000:513
fortune!rpw3 Jan 19 19:50:00 1984
Too bad that Hume lived in a world without long-distance communications.
The Mind-Only school of Buddhism anticipated Hume by about 1500 years.
The Madyamika school (Nagarjuna and followers) showed that the Mind-Only
school was still making the mistake of assuming that there was a thing
called "mind" (circa 500 A.D.).
"Plus ca change,..."
Rob Warnock
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