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An Evaluation of Hume's Theory of Mind
In the given extract from Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, the philosopher proposes that the source of all ideas that have been or will ever be thought of, derive ultimately from sensory experience. No matter how original or fanciful the idea, Hume claims, its roots can always be traced to the same source – sense impressions – and are created by compounding, transposing, augmenting or diminishing the original impression. He attempts to prove his theory by use of two distinct examples. The first is that of the idea of God. Hume pre-empts any counterargument that, if all ideas come from sense impressions, God then must exist, since the idea of God exists. He argues instead that all the virtues we associate with God – intelligence, wisdom and goodness – are merely our own virtues, but augmented infinitely, to a point which no human can reach. The second example tells of a man who has been blind all his life, and who can therefore have no real conception of colours, no matter how well described they are, or how powerful his imagination is. It is only when his eyesight is restored to him that he can comprehend the nature of colour, and thus open his mind to ideas he couldn’t possibly conceive of before. When Hume writes that the idea of God arises from augmentation without limit of our own virtues, he overlooks one key point. From where do we get the idea of infinity? Infinity has its uses in mathematics and physics, but those uses are nevertheless highly theoretical. We may, for instance, find the sum to infinity of a series of numbers. Nevertheless it only exists as an idea, and we know of nothing in the universe, not time nor space, which can be conclusively proven to be infinite. Even if they could be proven so, this does not mean that we would have the sense impression of infinity. Arguably, only a logical mind could have conceived of the infinite. Hume contends, by means of what is now known as “Hume’s fork”, that all thoughts a mind can contemplate can be divided into two separate areas. These he terms relations of ideas and matters of fact. Relations of ideas concern what is necessarily true or necessarily false by the demonstration of pure reason or mathematics. For example, to say “a line, which is at all points equidistant from a fixed centre, is a circle” is necessarily true, because it is true by definition. It will always be true so long as the definition of a circle is the same. Mathematics similarly uses definitions, but with symbols as the equivalent of definitions in language. Therefore because ‘11’ is defined as a precise value which never changes, it is necessarily true to say that “13 – 2 = 11” or that “5½ x 2 = 11” because of the respective definitions of ‘11’, the other numbers, and the symbols used to manipulate them. If ‘11’ was later redefined as ‘13’, the above equations would be necessarily false. Relations of ideas are always either necessarily true or necessarily false (even if, as in some mathematical theorems, it is not known which), because they can be proven or disproven within their own framework of rules.
The other type of thought that Hume speaks of is matters of fact. This refers to observations based on sense experience. If I observe that “the rock always falls to earth when I release it”, this is based on sense experience and as such, Hume argues, not true of necessity or of logic. If someone were to say in response that “the rock never falls to earth when I release it”, she may be lying, but hers is not a logical contradiction. After all, just because in the past the rock has always fallen to the ground, that doesn’t mean that it will always do so in the future. Indeed, we may find ourselves in a different part of the universe, in which the laws of physics that we currently know are not applicable. Hume’s theory of mind goes a long way to dispelling the rationalist idea that our minds are capable of understanding and predicting by means of pure reason alone. Following the examples of Locke and Berkeley, he introduces a more commonsensical approach to epistemology, placing the mind at the centre of this view, and looking upon it as a biological mechanism like the heart or the foot. While Descartes believed that we are practically unlimited in what we can know (after all, he believed he proved the existence of God), Hume was much more down-to-earth, and thought that we are limited by what sense impressions we receive. If we receive none, we can conceive of nothing or of very little; if we receive a lot, we can conceive of much more. While Hume’s model is compatible with materialism and modern science in its understanding of the mind as little more than biological, it is let down by its descent into determinism. Hume suggests a mechanism which operates passively – the mind receives sense impressions, from which ideas are then created; but the mind appears to have no power of distinguishing between the relative worth of ideas other than that allowed by sense impressions. This would suggest that two twins who grew up in the same place and experienced virtually the same things would react in exactly the same way when confronting the same dilemma. If this example were applied to two people who were not related, then their differing reactions could be explained deterministically, but in the case of twins this is not possible. From that we can conclude, contrary to Hume, that sense impressions are not the only determining factor in our ability to distinguish between ideas and our ability to form ideas. A central tenet of Hume’s theory is that relations of ideas impose no necessity on matters of fact. The acceleration of the gravitational pull is 9.8ms-2, and this number was reached by perfectly sound mathematical methods that no one can deny. However, these calculations need not include the mass of the Earth as a factor. Therefore, Hume would argue, it is entirely possible that scientists would have predicted the same figure for the acceleration of gravity on the moon, and been quite surprised to find that this is not the case. As acute an observation as it is that relations of ideas impose no necessity on matters of fact, it is interesting to observe that, had civilization followed this notion, it would probably not have achieved the heights it has. Much of science, although originating in empirical observation, is nevertheless founded on the idea that there are many things we can predict with mathematic laws, so long as no unknown factors change the situation. Further, Hume himself contradicts his own law. He observes that ideas come from sense impressions; but he then proceeds to make a universal law out of this observation, such that, he contends, all ideas comes from sense impressions. This is analogous to equating Earth’s gravity to the moon’s. Furthermore, it is arguable whether all ideas do proceed from sense impressions. In the extreme case, in which someone lives in a sensory vacuum and does not receive any sense impressions whatsoever, we can be quite certain that they would not then develop any ideas. However, there are many ideas whose roots we cannot trace to sense impressions. As mentioned earlier, the idea of infinity is one of these. Similarly, it may be argued that my idea of the other side of the Universe does not come from sense experience. I can only guess that it is quite similar to our part of the Universe, but I certainly have never experienced it in any way, and, with my limited knowledge of the physical structure of the Cosmos, am not even sure that there is such thing. While Hume’s theory of ideas, as mentioned earlier, is to a great extent commonsensical and logical, and compatible with a modern understanding of mind, its main weakness is its overwhelming determinism. In his model, the mind becomes a passive recipient of impressions, which it has little ability to distinguish between or disregard. If a computer were made under those specifications (which is not an unlikely prospect), we would hesitate to regard it as human in the sense that we are human. It would not automatically have a sense of self (which Hume dismisses as merely a store of memories, thoughts, and impressions). This is because the human mind is more than the sum of the parts that Hume, in his attempt to reduce and simplify, lists, and it is impossible that any “model” of the human mind would ever be anything other than very complicated.
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