No, you know well that’s not my argument. You appear to have fabricated that to facilitate your following personal attack, which you didn’t even have the courage to post to me. This, mind, after you suddenly gave up your end of the discussion you and I were having. Three posts you didn’t respond to. Perhaps you weren’t really in difficulties, perhaps you hadn’t really run out of arguments, perhaps you just forgot. Although three times does seem a bit, well, forgetful.
Now Juan and I are having a civilized discussion about Hume and causation. I’m very interested in the conversation and in getting my head round Hume’s thinking. Rather than making underhand insults in a halfhearted attempt to score twitter points, do you have a rational argument, something enlightening to contribute to our discussion?
I thought I was adding “something enlightening” to the discussion.
The problem is that you are turning my contribution into a personal attack it was never meant to be.
I was attempting to explain that relying on sentience rather than intelligence leads to the mistaken belief that comprehending the reasons behind events in the world only follows from experience when, in fact, it is more about the rational activity of making sense of experiences using the intellect.
One of the inherent differences between sentience and intelligence, I would propose, is that sentience merely reacts to what it expects to occur as a result of being conditioned to expect certain eventualities, whereas the intellect seeks to comprehend underlying explanations or “reasons” for things which may not be obvious from mere observation, no matter how consistently the expected events may be experienced.
This is where meaning, significance and explanation come into play. If it was merely a matter of expecting events because those events consistently follow from certain prior causes, there would be no need to make sense of the world around us, merely the requirement to respond appropriately. That, however, is NOT what science, properly understood tries to do, now is it?
I noticed that your response to Juan’s post #737 was wholly inadequate as far as his point was concerned.
Hume, I think, gives the example of Adam and a billiard table. Adam observes two balls on the table. One ball is moving toward the other. Adam has just been created. He has never seen a billiard ball, never seen any kind of ball, no experience of hard or soft, of anything rolling along a surface. In fact, no experience of anything at all, as he was only created moments before. Can Adam, by a priori logic alone, determine what will happen next? Will he think that one ball will move aside to let the other through? Or that it will jump in the air with surprise? Or the two balls will merge into one? Or explode? Or that one will move ghost-like through the other? If you think Adam could make the correct prediction then please provide the a priori logic he would use, otherwise I think you have to admit that our notions of causality must necessarily follow observation.
What you call “observation” is with respect to objects in the world around us. Sure, there has to be some experience with those objects to grasp their underlying nature, but that does not imply the Adam would not be able to “by logic alone” consistently infer from what is known about those objects how they will react once he has sufficiently understood their internal structure and the rules that govern that structure. You are overstating the case if you insist upon implying that the way the world functions has nothing whatsoever to do with its inherent nature – which is precisely what science and metaphysics seek to understand completely. There is no need to resort to a conclusion that our grasp of cause and effect in the world around us is merely the result of being conditioned to see things in a particular way. That would be presumptuous, in fact.
No, rational human beings look for the underlying explanations inherent in the world around us, from which a priori conclusions and predictions can be made about the world precisely because once the underlying structure and organizing principles for the physical universe are properly understood, it is those principles which do, in fact, determine what will happen in the world around us. Those principles do not depend for their existence upon our apprehending of them. Ergo, once known Adam can, in fact, make predictions about what will happen and do so a priori.
You are confusing the genesis of Adam’s ability to predict events in the world (which arises somewhat a posteriori) with the underlying truths with which Adam is dealing, which exist a priori and independently of Adam. This means a rational being from another planet who has never seen billiard balls or a billiard table but who properly grasps the laws of physics would be able to predict with absolute accuracy what will occur when a cue ball is struck. Now that may depend upon the alien properly measuring mass, forces, angles and the like, but it is untrue to say the alien’s ability to predict hinges entirely upon his experience with billiard balls.
No, it depends entirely upon his grasp of underlying laws of physics which apply to the billiard balls independently of the experiences of the alien. Entire branches of science depend upon this basic understanding.
