 Last time we talked about the general division of human faculties and then about the crucial and fundamental faculties of sense. And we had this interesting and radical observation that the qualities of things, their sounds, their colors, tastes, odors, the feelings we have about them, them being cold or warm, rough or smooth, all of those are inside of us, not outside in the object. Those are all effects occurring within a human being, within a human mind. When we emphasize these things being internal, we can formulate a whole doctrine called internalism that says that what's crucial is what's happening internal, as opposed to what's happening in the external world, about which we can apparently say little, but even Hobbes has a method of inferring what must be the case about those external objects from the effects they have on our internal sensations, perceptions, and so forth. Now the plan of this treatise, as is detailed on that elaborate table of contents I called your attention to, is to proceed from sensation through the other faculties that humans have, including imagination, internal, mental discourse, names, reasoning, knowledge, and science, which is the place I'm hoping to get to today, and then are pleasures and pains and passions, like anger, fear, joy, love, and so forth. And at that point we will have covered passions and reason, which are the two fundamental aspects of human nature, and we can begin to speculate about how humans relate to other humans. So we can move away from this internalist perspective to think about how humans relate together, and actually constitute corporate bodies grouped together at the highest level that of the political state, and then we can start to talk about the internal functions and processes of a corporate body, not just an individual human body. Let's talk about imagination, here's the definition he gives of it. It's an obscure conception remaining and little by little decaying from and after the fact of sense. So the fundamental thing is we have a sense of a color, a smell, an odor, a sound, whatever, and then this initial sensation, like you're all having a sense right now, like you're sensing that I'm wearing a blue or a dark sweater now, if you close your eyes you can still have that sense, you can still think about that ugly sweater that the professor is wearing, but it will not be as clear and vivid to you as if you open your eyes and actually have a sensation of it. It will have already decayed a little bit. And then if I ask you, remember that sweater I was wearing in class last year when I see you next year, you'll have a very vague sense of it, a completely decayed notion, in fact it may be corrupted with other ugly sweaters that you saw other professors wearing or things like that, but what in imagination in his sense is just a decayed version of a sense. And basically all other entities in the mind are decayed versions of sense or rearrangements of senses or their imaginative counterparts. Now we have these imaginations all the time and it's like we have thoughts all the time, but when we're awake, we're not conscious of them all. Now we would say they're subconscious, they're going on at some kind of subconscious level, but in Hobbes' view when we're awake, since we're perceiving other things, these imaginations and these other decaying thoughts don't appear to us because they get obscured by the things that are so much more vivid when we're actually sensing them. Just like there's actually stars out there and planets and so forth, but you can't see them because they're being obscured by the brightness of the sun which you perceive. But if you take the sun out, like after the sun sets and it's no longer obscuring those things, then those other stars become visible. And that is his explanation of the phenomenon of dreaming. What happens in dreams is that we're no longer having these decaying senses obscured by more vivid, direct senses and so they continue operating within our mind. And so the cause of dreams he says are actions or violence of inward parts of a person upon their brain. So what exact things you dream about he thinks have to do with various feelings that you have related to your various organs and that sort of thing impact which decaying senses or pieces of imagination become most salient to you. Yeah. It seems like he has kind of an inside out view of sensation and perception and all these things rather than an outside in. But this definition of imagination is very outside and it doesn't seem to account for things like inventiveness or imagining something that isn't a sensory perception that's occurring presently. OK, well, I'm not sure what the contrast between inside out and outside in that you have in mind is. Although that sounds interesting, so we'll explore it in due course. But you're right, when we think of imagination we think of things like Disney and cartoons and crazy things, not things that we just have immediate sensations of. And dreams are also filled with crazy things that we don't. I don't have a sensation of being able to fly when I jump off of a cliff and so forth. So how are those actually decayed senses? So what he says is that again using this kind of hydraulic and water metaphor. OK, so the decaying of sense is an effect that keeps happening after the sense reaches us like the way that if a stone is thrown into water successive it creates a rippling effect of waves that keep going until it eventually dies out. And he says that water could be affected by multiple different things like you could throw several stones into the water but the effect of them would be unified into these rippling effects again. So we can have several different senses and they resonate and they ripple through our minds but then they can become combined. So we can have a sensation of a horse and a sensation of a human being and then these ripples can continue to go even when we're not consciously aware of them and combine themselves into an image of a half horse, half man or a centaur. So the kind of imagination you're talking about imagining things like a half horse, half man, how do we get that? He says those are constructed out of essentially composite images of things. We imagine golden mountains because we have a sensation of gold and we have a sensation of a mountain and those get combined together into an idea of a golden mountain, something that doesn't really exist. But if you had no concept, no sensation of a mountain or no sensation of gold, there's no way I could describe or get me to imagine the idea of a golden mountain or a centaur if you hadn't had any experience of humans and horses. So all products of imagination are going to be recombined elements of sense. The mind in his view doesn't have anything else to work with. You can't just bootstrap and start inventing concepts and ideas and thoughts like that spontaneously. You can rearrange imaginations and senses you have at will. So even if you didn't dream of a golden mountain, I could ask you to imagine one and because you've experienced gold and because you've experienced a mountain, there is a mental process that you're capable of combining those and imagining a golden mountain. But you cannot possibly imagine anything that doesn't have any basis in your sensation. So all products of imagination, the most wondrous, crazy things that the most psychedelic cartoonists and so forth have ever invented are all just aspects of things that have been in sense at some point. Was there another question? Yeah. I think I was just going to, I thought I got what she was saying in terms of the originality thing. I think it's like the example, like instead of like half a horse and half a person and like you know what, yeah, like coming from something you've never, like a color you've never seen or like a color you can't even, that would be, I think that's what you meant. Okay. Yes. Well, so could you imagine a color you've never seen? Now I think in Hobbes' view, you can't. I don't think you can do that. Hume takes a different view and he has this famous case called the missing color of blue where you haven't experienced a certain color of blue but you've experienced hundreds of other shades of blue and if you looked at a set at a continuum of blue shades, you might be able to notice a shade that you'd never, and one was missing, you might be able to notice something is missing in the series even though you've never had experience of that exact shade. Okay. And so we'll get to that example in due course whether, and because that looks like it is possible for you to conceive of something, not to conceive of it even though it hadn't been in sensation originally. Okay. All in that very example of colors or sounds or something like that. Okay. So he calls these fictions of the mind and he differentiates them from phantasms which we can get by like pressing on our organs like if you, if you push, if you clap your hands against your own ear, you'll hear sounds or if you push your, push onto your eyeball, you might see colors or if you stare at the sun, there might still be an image retaining, that's different than these fictional things which are composites of actual senses. Also he observes that we can take notice not only of external objects through sense but we can actually take notice of our own conceptions. Okay. And this is the process we call remembering or memory. So if I've had, if you've had this sensation of my blue sweater and then I ask you, you know, tomorrow when I'm wearing a black jacket, do you remember that blue sweater? You can recall to mind what I was doing yesterday and there'll be a kind of image that pops up in your mind and that is a sensory image. But sensations can only be caused by an active external objects, actions affecting my sense organs and my mind. So this doesn't appear to be a case of sensation because there's nothing external. If I say, you know, think of an elephant or something, then an image is going to come into your mind and it's going to have to do with something you sense before, either a real elephant or a picture of an elephant in books or something like that. But it's very close to sensation and it is a kind of sensory image which we then re-sense and that's why we call it remembering or recollecting it and or reminiscing it, okay, all these returns because we're going back and doing it over again. And so he describes it as being a kind of sixth sense that is internal to us, a kind of way we have of sensing our own sensations. But it's not technically, I mean, sense is defined as actions caused by external objects. So it's either not literally a sense or we have to have two senses of the word sense, one which is the normal one caused by external objects, the other is this special power we have of re-sensing things or re-membering them, okay. And he distinguishes between obscure and clear conceptions. He distinguishes his definition in two seven and obscure conception is that which represents the whole object together but none of the smaller parts itself and as more fewer parts are represented so is the conception of representations had to be more or less clear. The example is a foreign city that you visited. So if you visited New York and I say think of New York you might have this image in your head of sort of the Statue of Liberty and the World Trade Center and a bunch of buildings but it's pretty obscure. When you were actually in New York you had these sensations of very detailed things, exact streets, walking up Broadway, walking up Fifth Avenue, seeing each of the shops and the stores and you know, and individual people, there you have all these very clear conceptions happening and the day after you got back from a trip to New York you could recount a lot of those. The sensations are already decaying in your mind and becoming less clear. But if you haven't visited New York in 20 years then all of this all of this decays into a kind of very simple picture of a sort of outline of some buildings in the Statue of Liberty the most vivid thing and it's sort of an obscure conception. But a clear conception for Hobbes is nothing more than a greater definition of the individual parts of the thing and being able to recollect as many parts of it as contributed to the original sensation of it. And what happens in dreams he says the reason we don't realize we're dreaming even though crazy stuff happens is because it's presented to us like we are in sensation and so it's like senses are just being presented to us and we don't think to doubt like none of you think Emma you're not wondering am I actually sleeping and dreaming right now because you're having a direct sensation of these things happening and it all looks very vivid. Well that happens in sleep as well and so there's no actual way to distinguish between a conception in sleep and to determine if you are sleeping or if you are awake. Hobbes says I don't know of any criterion by which you could ultimately distinguish that and it remains a problem how one would differentiate between sleeping and dreaming. So that is his account of imagination and with sense and imagination which includes memory and these conceptions of decaying thoughts those are the basic elements of the human mind. The best is how those elements get arranged or in what succession we treat them. So he says that the succession of conceptions in the mind their series or consequence one after another can be casual or incoherent as it is in dreams or it can be orderly incoherent in which case we call it discourse and he comes up with this awkward general term for both incoherent and coherent successions of thought which he calls Discursion. In the Leviathan he uses a term that's a bit more familiar and so I'll often revert to this he said he calls mental discourse. So you've got to realize that in your mind there is constantly mental discourse going on. You are constantly having a series of thoughts. It's almost impossible to stop having a series of thoughts like if somebody says don't think about anything for a while that you can't do that. You can't even do that for a second. It takes massive training by Buddhist monks that have been working on this for thousands of years to get people to be able to enter into a state where they cannot have a sequence of thoughts for a short period of time. Unless you've been trained in that it's impossible. You will constantly have a succession of thoughts occurring to your mind and the succession can be disorderly or it can be orderly but it is a fact about the human mind that we're constantly presented with these. Most often just with things that we're having in sensation and we're just navigating around the world trying to avoid running into objects and things like that. But even when we're not sensing anything even when we're sleeping and have no sensation at all we have a constant succession of thoughts in dreams. But even in the state between active sensing and dreaming like if you're just sitting around spacing out or something there's still a succession of thoughts there. And it's a really profound thing to think about. Where is this coming from? Where are these thoughts? Where is this constant series of thoughts that I can't stop? Where is that coming from? How is that being produced? And in Hobbes' view it's all just redounding and refracting and reflecting of these entities that entered through your sense organs and these sensations. Now he says what makes some thoughts coherent or to have a consequence with one another is if they were coherently combined when they were originally thought. So if you think to yourself that warmth tends to follow fire and cold tends to follow ice that's because of a sensation of ice cooling down a drink or fire warming your hands at a bonfire. Or if you've never had any of those experiences somebody else who had those experience who transmitted them to you in thoughts and then you imagined them related them to other things you knew. But what makes them ultimately coherent is that they're grounded in original sensations that you had. They become less and less coherent as they become detached from the original situations in which they were combined. Now in imagination we form lots of concepts of cause-effect relationships and we even reason backwards from effects to causes and this is perhaps even more familiar. So some of you set an alarm in order to wake up this morning. Why did you do that? Well it went something like this, you've posited for yourself the goal of graduating from university and you thought if I'm going to graduate from university I have to pass my classes and if I'm going to pass my classes I have to actually attend those classes but if I'm going to attend those classes then I have to wake up in the morning. But there's no way I can wake up in the morning unless I have an alarm. So I've got a set and an alarm and the idea there is that the setting of the alarm causes you to wake up being awake causes you to go to class going to class causes you to pass the class passing the class causes you to be able to graduate. And we are constantly imagining these chains of cause-effect relationships. They're how we decide to go anywhere or do anything. So we become quite used to this idea of positing these relationships and so not all of them and we can sort of recombine these things at will. And even that chain of reasoning may not have been very good right? Just coming to class doesn't mean that you pass. It's sort of a necessary but not a sufficient condition right? But we and you've seen people that have gone to class pass before and so that's one of the reasons you make that inference or because I tell you that's how it goes and you think about it that way. But as these things get further and further detached from actual sensations of them they become less and less reliable. So going to class means that you're going to get a degree is a lot less clear of a causal relationship than putting ice in your drink makes it cold. And that's because the latter observation is much closer to the original sensation that gave rise to it. Okay. Hobbes then goes through a bunch of other kinds of discretion or mental discourse that we have including things like ranging, just searching for something like lost keys, what he calls sagacity or hunting. Like when we set certain goals and then we figure out how to go out and find those things. Reminiscence, which he describes as taking a beginning from our appetite and proceeding from the present backwards or from the future back to the present. I just sort of gave an example of that. And then one that he calls experiment and here's his definition of experiment. Remembrance of the succession of one thing to another, that is of what was antecedent and what consequent and what concomitant. So subsequent to the fire was warmth, subsequent to the ice was cold. Experiment just is the remembrance. So the calling back to mind through that power of that exact succession. And experience is having many experiments of that kind. That is remembrance of what antecedents have followed what consequence and the more such memories you have, the more experience you have. So I have a lot of experience with hot and cold liquids because I make hot coffee every morning on the stove and then I cool my drinks with ice later on. So I have a lot of experience in what doesn't sound like very valuable experience and I'm sure you all have it too. But we're all pretty experienced in how to warm up drinks and cool them down. But that's all based on experiments that either we've done or other people have done and they've been reported to us and related to other thoughts that we have so that we can understand them. And on this basis we form, here's some other forms of discouragement or mental discourse, expectation or presumption of the future, making remembrance be the provision or conjecture of things to come. So having seen lighting things on fire, causing them heating up, then I see somebody else putting a lighter or sticking a match to something. I imagine that that thing will be on fire in the future. Or the example Hobbes gives, having seen people beaten for punishment as a punishment for a crime and then seeing somebody else commit the crime, your mind goes to thinking about the punishment. The flip side of that conjecture of the past or presumption of a fact, which is when we see something, seeing that something is present, thinking that I've seen the same thing and it's antecedent, also having been seen before. So if I, having seen ashes remain after a bonfire, and now I go somewhere else on the beach and I see a bunch of ashes, I conclude there's been a fire because in previous cases I've seen those ashes produced by it. And so I reason that something happened in the past that I can't now see and that's the flip side of reasoning that something will happen in the future that I can't now see. So all of those are parts of our mental discourse and we form something he calls signs, which he defines as having so often observed like antecedents to be followed by like consequence that whenever one sees the antecedent, one looks for the consequence and vice versa. So having seen it rain so often when we see clouds, maybe not something you have much experience of around here, but having grown up in Seattle, I have this great experience of when you see clouds, you know rain is coming. If you've seen that it's rain, like you walk outside in the streets or wet, you infer that there were clouds there before. That is clouds are signs of rain and rain is signs of clouds. One is a presumption of the future, the other is a presumption of fact and a conjecture about the past. But notice these are synthetic things that we have to put together in our own mind when we see the cloud but it hasn't rained yet, the thought, the expectation that it will rain is based on some, insofar as that's a coherent thought, is based on some prior experience of that happening. Now you may have also had prior experience of there being clouds and it not raining, in which case that should be brought into the consideration that it's actually only probable that it will rain if there are clouds and so forth. Or you get more specific, more experience with different kind of clouds. So if you have strato-cumulus clouds, those don't actually produce rains, but if you have cumulonimbus clouds, then we have experience of those reliably producing rain and so forth. All of that is just getting deeper, greater experience with those and thus having greater coherence of those thoughts later. But here's a crucial point that he makes that these signs are all conjectural and often they fail, right? As the example itself shows, it doesn't always rain when we see clouds. And their assurance is always more or less, never full and evident. Even day and night following one another. You've seen that over and over, you might think it's a certainty that the sun will come up after it sets again tomorrow, but there is no assurance of that whatsoever. There's nothing inexperienced that can prove that because there's nothing but that series of one thing following another, but there's no added third thing that says it's going to necessarily happen again. As Hobbes puts it, experience concludes nothing universally. If the signs hit 20 times for once missing, you can wager 20 to one on the event, but you can't conclude that it's true. Okay, so maybe we've seen the sun rise a million times and we've never seen it happen. Well, then it might be a safe bet to bet a million to one that it will rise tomorrow and one can make such a wager, but what one cannot do is claim that they have certainty that it will happen tomorrow. The sun could go supernova tonight and then there would be no sun rise on earth tomorrow because it would be destroyed and so forth. Okay, so there's nothing in experience except this conjunction of these things and the greater and more often we experience that the more probable we consider it to be, but we don't sense, there's no separate apprehension of the causes and effects themselves, yeah. Is this just for experiential things or also, this is also applied to things like two hydrogens combined with oxygen and forms of water, like natural laws and all those physics that we think about. Well, this is meant to be everything because there is nothing in any of that that you said that isn't ultimately grounded in sense. So how do we know that the combination of two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom produce water? Well, because somebody's experienced that. They analyzed water into those and isolated those elements out and saw that it actually produced those things and then saw that bringing hydrogen and oxygen back together in that combination actually produced this thing, liquid water, right? That's how we know. We say we know that, right? It's based on experience, right? So, but all we have is that experience to go on. The next time we observe oxygen and hydrogen being combined, it might not produce water. It might produce fire. It's not very likely that it will. In fact, there's no reason to think that it will. But there's nothing in our experience that precludes that from happening. So we can only depend on probabilities. There's nothing in seeing it happen once or having it seeing it happen a thousand times that proves it must happen that way. Okay, and in fact, there are exceptions, okay? So if you combine those atoms in an environment that has a totally different kind of atmosphere or that the temperature is a lot lower, it won't produce water or the temperature is way higher. It won't produce water. It produces plasma or something or produces ice instead of liquid water, even though the sensations we've only had have been producing liquid water, okay? So far, he said nothing about laws of nature or anything. He will get into saying a lot about that later. But at this point, all we have is these signs that we receive in sense and the probability that future things are gonna be like them. But there's nothing in these sensations that makes it certain that that has to happen, okay? You seem very dubious of that, and that's a good thing to be dubious about. But he's right that from experience, we cannot conclude anything universally. We cannot conclude that the sun is gonna rise tomorrow. We can be pretty sure, okay? But only pretty sure, right? Because all we're talking about is that's what's happened for all that we know, but something else could happen we don't know. God could make it not happen. Aliens who have some vast technology that are able to move our sun tonight between midnight and two a.m. might move our sun or destroy our entire galaxy, in which case it wouldn't rise tomorrow. I wouldn't wanna make a bet on that because every time I've observed it and everyone I've ever heard of has observed it that way. And so I'm pretty sure it's gonna rise tomorrow. But don't make a hasty leap from having observed something happening a lot of times in a certain way that it must always happen or universally will happen. Yeah? One, the alien human nature said that things do not exist outside of what we sense them, so natural laws only exist because we've observed them. So is that in a sense explaining why we can't? Yes, so that's book two, section 10. I mean, he may say that earlier as well. The time I'm remembering him saying that is two 10, but that's absolutely right because those sensations are just, never forget, they are just modifications of our own mind. We don't have access to the objects that are out there. If we could bypass sensation and have our minds directly apprehend the objects whose actions cause our senses, then maybe we could say, okay, whatever it is that causes the appearance of an oxygen molecule and causes the appearance of a hydrogen molecule. If I could know the true structure of whatever those things are and exactly how they did act, then maybe I could have a different kind of science about them. But the problem is all I can access is the sensations of those things that I've had, and those are always ever internal to my own mind or somebody else's mind. Okay, so that's a good point and he does frequently remind us of that point and he ends a lot of chapters by saying, oh yeah, and don't forget I already showed that all of these qualities only exist in our minds. Now it turns out there will be natural laws and laws of nature, but these have to do, these hook up with this theory about this internalist theory of thought. But we have to wait until we get to that. Okay, was there another question that I missed? Yeah, go ahead. I was just gonna ask if you could Yes, conception just means decayed sense. Okay, so that is imagination, but imagination is used simultaneously with synonymously with conception. Okay, so sense is the fundamental thing and then there are these decayed things which are still senses. So in a way they are still senses. The sense is like an external thing and then it becomes like a conceptual thing. Sense is internal but it's activated by actions on something external, by some kind of activities or motions that are happening external to my sense organs. Okay, but sense is totally internal. Like red and blue is internal to me. Hot and cold is internal to me. Okay, and then concepts are just things like warmth, coldness, redness, blueness, and those are just, if you think about those, okay, think about redness. And there you've got the concept of redness, okay? But all that is is just a less vivid image of red than you would have if your eyes were open and you were sensing red. Okay, like I am looking at that guy's sweater is partly red. That's a very vivid red to me. If I imagine red, it's just not quite that clear. It's a decayed version of that, okay? And it's shocking to think that the concepts, I thought our concepts were these big things and definitions and discourse and everything. But all of our concepts are just these decayed forms of sensation as well in his view. Okay, so I'm gonna, running short of time, so I'm gonna skip into what he does in section five on names, reasoning, and discourses. He reminds us at the beginning that the succession of conceptions in our mind are produced by the successions of conceptions that are produced by the senses and these have to do with activities that happen outside of us that we don't have access to except for the effects they have on sensation. That's another way of defining the doctrine of empiricism. We don't have any, it's a very radical empiricism. We don't even, not just the concepts themselves all originate in the sense, but even the succession of them, like which ones follow which, whether warmth follows ice or fire, even those successions must be based in the successions of senses that we experienced. And there's no conception that doesn't follow or precede innumerable others. We're constantly having these acts of sense and forming these conceptions. And these conceptions follow one another, not however we want them to be followed, but as we happen to have experienced them when we saw them. Now that is a condition or heard them or whatever. That is a condition that animals are in and he makes this interesting observation about animals. They have the providence to try to hide surplus meat of their prey from other predators, okay? But they aren't capable of remembering where they hid it. And so this he says is a crucial moment in human evolution, right? Some human began to advance over these beasts by remembering, observing that I couldn't remember where this was hidden. And so tried to change the situation by setting up a visual mark, what he calls a mark, a sensible object which humans erect voluntarily in order to remember something that's past, okay? For example, a rock carrying, a stack of rocks that's on the trail that tells you go this way instead of that way. That's what he calls a visible mark that we set up as a reminder of something. Animals are not capable of setting up marks like that in his view. And his account of what a name is is that it's a aspect of human voice that is arbitrarily imposed as a mark in order to bring to mind or recollect some conception of a thing. So names are just like rock carons that are designed to indicate to us a memory that something was here before. This is the way of the trail or this is where the meat has been stored or this is where you can buy coffee or whatever. Any signs that we see out there, why do we have signs in a speed limit 60? Why are they putting that there? Well, those marks enter our mind and they remind us that the limit of traveling on that road is 60 miles per hour and that's the point of them, okay? And this use of names, he says, is what makes science possible for humans, but the beast cannot have it. Now, the production of these names begins to, initially, is attached to the forms of sensation. So we name hot things warm and we name cold things cool and so forth. But as we attach names, then we start attaching names for more and more general things about them or we come up with a single name that describes a single thing but a thing that has a lot of different attributes. So if I say, you know, this is a human being that's one name for it, but it has a lot of different parts. It has a lot of different, it's wearing clothes, it's in a certain position, it's in a certain place. Which thing am I referring to by saying that's a human, it's not clear. We have to come to some conventional agreement about what these marks and these names actually represent. But in this process of coming up with and using, and all of these names are arbitrary, a stack of rocks indicating that this is the way to the trail, that's completely arbitrary. In fact, it's the arbitrariness that makes it a mark. Like sometimes you can't tell where the trail is because you can't tell is that just a random stack of rocks or is that actually a rock carrying that says, this is the way we're supposed to go. The more arbitrary and the more crazy, the less likely it is to just appear in nature, the more convinced we are that it is actually a mark of these things. But since our universal names don't apply to every particular of the thing that they attach to, we get this phenomenon of equivocation where a name means multiple things. And these equivocations introduce confusion when we're discussing things. And the process of eliminating that confusion and arriving at knowledge where all such equivocation has been eliminated and I can trace what thoughts are being used in these marks and in this language back to actual primal sensations that they correspond to is what he calls understanding.