DAVID HUME

This is a webcast lecture on David Hume and the problem of causation. This is the first ten minutes of a lecture lasting about one hour. The rest of the lecture can be heard at this location: http://journalism.winchester.ac.uk/?page=392 - where there are also extensive written notes and references. Hume was the last ad greatest of the empiricists and he is routinely described as the most important philosopher that the British Isles has ever produced. His work is of vital day to day importance for journalists because it deals with what can be beieved and is a trenchant warning against the problem of false inference - a very common and serious mistake made by journalists.

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People & Blogs

Tags:

• DAVID
• HUME
• JOURNALISM
• CAUSATION
• CAUSALITY
• TRUTH
• EMPIRICISM

[ORAKAR]

When he's discussing the 'prime mover' he means the 'cosmological argument' not the 'ontological argument' (which is an a priori argument about God being maximally great)

[michalchik]

Nothing has a single cause. To create an apple pie from scratch you need to create a universe like ours. There is no need to be a first cause, the universe could be infinitely old. A universe that goes through a point of complete indeterminacy can exist without a cause also.

[michalchik]

@CurryCobra I understand your frustration. English doesn't capture these issues very well. That is mainly because our intuition doesn't. Think about what I said an then consider that the time line does not exist in time. Also consider that there is no point on the line that is not a finite distance from any other point. It is really not any different from the fact that we can never reach the end of time, it is just that we are used to time going one way.

[CurryCobra]

@michalchik I realize it cannot have a start if it is infinity, I cant quite articulate that as I wanted though. :/

[michalchik]

@CurryCobra "there would be infinite time between now and a point" Between now and what point? The start? This is tricky stuff. You are making a common mistake with infinity and thinking of it as if it has a beginning. Claiming that it takes an infinite amount of time to get here rests on the assumption that it has a start. An infinite time scape just IS. All points on it are real. It is time itself so it does not have to traverse time to now. Pass present and future just are.

[CurryCobra]

@michalchik it cannot be infinite, there would be infinite time between now and a point. Think of dominoes, if we are a certain point, time must traverse an infinite number to arrive at our point which is impossible. It would never arrive.

[michalchik]

@chriscannotbecool It is very good that you question this. This idea seemed like nonsense to me until I seriously started to study quantum mechanics. Nevertheless, multiple experiments have proven that at very small scales the properties of reality are undefined and then randomly come into and out of existence. Even hard vacuums lacking all matter and energy are a boiling sea of things popping in and out of existence. I don't have enough space to explain the experiments.

[chriscannotbecool]

@michalchik things can happen without a cause? I need more evidence to believe this.

[arch8887]

at 4:08  Think you mean "deism".

[michalchik]

@TheMichlink The claim that everything has a cause because everything we know about has a cause is inductive leap and factually wrong. We have empirically determined (trumps any argument) that at the level of planks constant physical phenomena are acausal though stochastically predictable. Mortal beings and natural forces clearly can create mortal beings. The former we do all the time. Once again, the part does not have all the properties of the whole so it does not follow we are immortal.

[TheMichlink]

@michalchik Only an immortal being can create mortal being. Only the uncaused can cause the things that causes and so on. Since we are part of the whole universal system that would imply that we are not cause by something or someone and therefore, we are immortals which is absurd.