For Hume Fans

I get what Hume meant. He meant that on the level of absolute certainty, we must always question things. Is it a 99.9 % chance? Many things are and we can be fine with them as a form of truth. But for some reason I will never fully get Hume wanted to focus on the .1%. That is 1/10 of one percent. We cannot know empirically things as absolute, he said.

What Hume was pushing for seems to be true, but it doesn't work without a discussion of what truth actually means to us "actively." It work greats from an armchair, Reid suggested. I think this was Reid's point. We actively know that we are awake, that reality is objective and solid, and that we have a self. His point was also that, like Newton, he (Reid) can describe a self or a cause, but he doesn't presume to be able to fully explain it. Newton said this of gravity. Reid wasn't saying what self actually was or where it came from; he was just describing it and saying it exists.

We don't any better today know what consciousness is yet many of our assumptions are based on that knowledge. Like, for example, the idea that humans possess it and animals don't. Another is the over-confident notion that our minds are linked together in a collective consciousness. They know so much about consciousness that they see a magical and spiritual whole. For my part, when words like that are used, we can start to suspect that an active and real version of the world has gone awry.

The question about how confident we should be is expressed well in this quote from an academic article:

"We have made a great deal of progress in understanding brain activity, and how it contributes to human behaviour. But what no one has so far managed to explain is how all of this results in feelings, emotions and experiences. How does the passing around of electrical and chemical signals between neurons result in a feeling of pain or an experience of red?" (Goff, Durham University, 2019)

The question inherent in this (how much we know about consciousness?) is the same inherent in the difference between science and philosophy (and, interestingly enough, between Newtwon and Hume). Are we asking if the thing is real or are we asking if we understand it? Perhaps only a philosopher know the difference between these two things fully.

I believe, if nothing else, this is the danger of Hume's obsession. His love of skepticism, his preoccupation with the limits of knowledge and induction, have produced irony: the undermining of reality (Aristotle's?) frees man to invent and live in an alternate version that he constructs and that, over time, sheds itself of rules.

Part of the problem is that men after David Hume attempted to participate in his skepticism without the same earnest goals for knowledge (epistemology). This new generation had different expectations for truth and they were not aware, like Hume, that the focus was ultimately limited to the .1%. The followers, devoid of (philosophy?, process thought? self-awareness?) his gifts wished and achieved his level of skepticism about the entire 100%.