Hume's Causality: Bones, Bells and Balls

Part 2 of my mini series about causality and necessity in 18th century philosophy. This part presents a brief outline of Hume's argument against the objectivity of causal relations. It covers Hume's separation of consciousness into ideas and sense impressions as well as his problem of induction.

[nicholaus]

This is a fantastically clear explanation!

I'm working on a paper in philosophy of science and sometimes I get so bogged down in the abstract details that I need something straightforward to reorient myself.

[jamesroberts]

The implications of classical conditioning on free will is a connection I’ve tried considering. So far it has me beat.

[bluekozikowski]

Man your videos are so good, I laughed when it zoomed into Hume questioning the laws of physics

[JellisVaes]

We need more animated videos from you! More!!

[farwaali]

I wish they could teach content in this form that would be entertaining and knowledgeable at the same time <3

[mahmoudalfouly]

Man! You deserve much more recognition. Thanks for this amazing explanation!

[nay.m]

Thanks a lot man, this was a lifesaver. Love from india.

[doctorinternet]

it's interesting that, in buddhist philosophy, thoughts and ideas were sense impressions as well, coming from the sixth sense, which is the mind. I wonder how this categorization coould have changed hume's thoughts.

[nix-pixie]

Ed! This is fantastic! 🥹 it’s the first video that ACTUALLY helped me to understand Hume and which also made me laugh and which was soo cool and pleasant to watch and, what is super important, to listen! You should become rich!

[jmarz]

Hume was largely refuting the Metaphysics (the Neo-Platonism + Aristotelian infused thought of St. Thomas) that was still being taught in the Universities. The Empiricists were stanchly anti-Catholic and/or anti-Scholastic. Hume was rejecting the idea of metaphysical "necessity". Light reflects off billiard balls - not "necessity" - and enters into our eyes. Hume moved "cause" from the ontological realm to the epistemological.

As Newton stated:

"I have not as yet been able to discover the reason for these properties of gravity from phenomena, and I do not feign hypotheses. For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction."

[ismailmoosa]

David Hume, discovering what Ghazali and many others spoke about centuries before

[lizzie]

He basically ignored physics, the bell ringing that later on follows a bone is open for doubt, the direct cause of ringing a bell is not a bone but sound, and it depends on the persons will to decide if to use it, while to say that if a ball touching the other ball and it causes it to move is open for debate is falls, since physics support, prove and explains why touching another ball will cause movement and not creation of chickens.

[jamestagge]

That by which Hume was able to formulate his proposition and the context in which it functioned and was considered, defines certain necessities that he could not deny OR HE COULD NOT HAVE FORMULATED IT TO BEGIN WITH. Either it is, or it ain’t.

1. He chose to employ in his proposition the concepts of billiard balls specifically to the exclusion of all other things. This cannot be questioned. This means by definition that he had to have recognized and acknowledged the physical characteristics of all of those entities from which he chose the billiard balls or how could he have decided on the billiard balls as opposed to something else such as crochet balls? So the assertion of the form and function of all of those entities in material reality that he had to have perceived (or again, he could not have made the distinct choice he did) was that by which he was able to choose. That he claimed to recognized only sense impressions does not alter the point. There is no escaping this.
2. In that he had to have recognized the characteristics of the billiard balls or the sense impressions of them, again, the only means by which he could have chosen them to the exclusion of all else, he had to have known that motion was not one of those characteristics. First, motion is not tangible (but rather a phenomenon) as is all of that by which the billiard balls were defined in their physicality or the sense impressions which were drawn from them. Secondly, were motion a characteristic of billiard balls, both not just one would have been moving. That the one ball was moving then has to have been the effect of a cause of that motion having been imparted. There is no escaping this.
3. Then, that he had to have known that motion had to have been imparted to the moving ball, he had to have understood that that which imparted that motion was itself a moving entity for which motion was also not a characteristic. I am sorry but this is cause and effect, like it or not.

What Hume did in the formulation of his theory was akin to “appealing to truths to formulate a position which denied truth”. He doesn’t get to have done that any more than the rest of us.

That entities are distinct, they are that by their characteristics. That they are distinct, they are chosen for their characteristics because each imposes a specific effect from which to choose. The balls were chosen because they would roll, the reality of that to which he had to have surrendered, a given because they were his choice. He did not choose bricks or the like because they wouldn’t roll, necessary to the purpose of the analogy.

That recognition in part defeats his theory of no cause and effect.

A final point…..the proposition that ball 1 hitting ball 2 would cause it to move, is inductive only in the most general context of consideration. However, in a sub-context where we consider that motion had to have been imparted to the moving ball, it is deductive. His theory makes no sense.

[ms]

Isn't the event with the billiard balls given further causal elucidation with Newton's laws, e.g. inertia, and so on. So it's not that one day they might stop acting this way, but that they act this way by laws of physics, which require further exploration. A separate, interesting question that we might never answer seems to be one of free will and whether or not we ourselves are automatons whose actions are governed the same way.

[alwaysgreatusa]

No impression, no idea ? The idea of causation as being a productive relationship persists. Where did this idea come from ? As Hume shows, there is no actual impression of a casual (productive) relationship in our experience of nature. So, what explains the existence of this idea ? Hume tends to view it as an unjustified fabrication on our part based on our experiences of invariable association. But where is his proof that such a fabrication ever took place ? He has no other choice, but to go back to his own dubious claim, 'No impression, no idea' as his only 'proof'. But his supposed 'proof' actually serves as evidence against him ! Where exactly is this impression of essential production ? Where exactly is this impression of invisible connection ? In other words, from what elementary sense impressions has the complex idea of causation as an essentially productive and an invisibly connective relationship been produced (or fabricated) ? In fact, how is Hume, himself, even able to think of a human fabrication (production) of any kind-- or of impressions producing ideas -- in the first place, if there are no impressions other than those of mere association in nature ? No, the human mind enters nature already armed with ideas (concepts) of its own that make sense of our experiences - it's called Reason, and mere experience cannot explain Reason, quite the reverse !

[lewiscoacher]

", , , the dog must think that the bell has some kind of treat generating power, " and we wonder why philosophy staggers
from one drunken fiasco to another. The dog has "learned" something subliminally, just as humans do.

[alwaysgreatusa]

The analogy simply doesn't hold. First of all, there is no proof that Pavlov's dogs believed that the bells themselves magically produced the food. Second, few humans are so naive that their general understanding of causation is that it is nothing more than an invariable association. How one comes to believe in the existence of a causal relationship, and one's understanding of what a causal relationship is in essence, are two distinct things. Simply to know that the night invariably follows the day is not the same thing as naively believing the day causes the night -- nor that the light of day causes the dark of night. The reason we do not believe such foolish things is because we have a more profound and general understanding of the nature of causation than is offered by Hume.

[alwaysgreatusa]

Did Pavlov really think dogs were naive ? His experiments were designed to show that animals in general (including humans) could be trained to engage in conditioned behavior. If you remove this general application from the consequences of his experiments, they become much less interesting -- and much less relevant.