David Hume 1711 - 1776

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DUALISM IN DAVID HUME Part 1 first draft

Gary. C. Moore:
Is there a kind of dualism in David Hume? Well, yes, a kind. Is it the kind that posits two realities? Sort of. Are they separate as natural and supernatural are or, for that matter, self-conscious solipsism and the external world? No, not at all. Each creates contexts the other. Each applies the other ‘to make sense’ of itself, that is, ‘to make sense’ means to make a context of sensation interpreted by logicThose two realities are strict and radical logic which automatically becomes a radical skepticism because logic by itself cannot say anything beyond the realm of sensation. Can it even say that ‘there is’ sensation, that it exists either as a unified field or mass of individual sensations? No, not pure logic per se.

Jud Evans:
Do forgive me Gary if I approach this Humean question of duality employing the clanking, ponderous, mechanistic rumbling methodology of nominalism. I use the word 'rumble' in the sense that customs officers use it when they board a ship to search for contraband. I fully realise that we are in an area where any progress whether actual or imagined can only be essayed with a heavy reliance on intuition, in that no hard and fast evidence can be produced either to deny or support our guesswork on the matter. It is often thought that to try and work out how the human holism thinks about its thinking is difficult because the cognitive process is like a kind of loop, and it is impossible to stand away from or outside of the loop and watch it in action.

For me the neurophysical topology is conceived as a self-referential network whose components are connected as in a linked series much like a fishing net, where, when the self-referential switch is thrown, the network generates a spurious quasi-logical duality in order to access the information required. I make it easy on myself by thinking of the thinking as not existing separately from the holism of which the activity of thinking is a part, and try to force the closure of this false-logical component so that whenever the holism is thinking about itself and the way it is thinking, there is no physical or imagined 'mental' drawing apart, as if two duellists stand back to back and then walk 12-paces and turn and regard each other, but rather the brain embarks on another mode of mono-modalic-self-regard at the same-time realising that it IS the self-regarding as it self-regards itself. Consider this statement by Lord Berners:

'I can remember very vividly the first time I became aware of my existence; how for the first time I realised that I was a sentient human being in a perceptible world.'

From: First Childhood.

He makes the cardinal cognitive error of classification by placing 'I' in one box and 'My Existence' in the other, as if there was some 'difference' between them. {Heidegger as you know calls this 'the ontological difference.'] What he is doing with  'existence'  is what Hume does with 'sensation' — he makes a context of it in order to better understand and make sense of it. I would go further than that and say that this cognitive creation of an ontological dualism is vital and necessary EVEN TO THINK AND TALK ABOUT IT but having thought about it and sussed it out, we are then in a position to kick away the metaphysical ladder by which means we were able to gain the necessary cognitive altitude to see the overall view. We can then shut up about it rather than write boring books like Being & Time, which only proved that poor Heidegger was still stuck on the ladder.]


When we feel pain and unpleasant sensations in our toe we imagine we are identifying or becoming aware of 'pain' in a particular part of our body, when the existential truth of the matter is that we are becoming aware of our thobbing toe, which most of the time we ignore unless we are cutting our toenails. There is no sensation — there is the toe — which communicates its faulty condition by sending unpleasant electronic messages to the brain via nerve fibres. So Hume is in error IMO and we are not creatures in thrall to, and utterly dependent upon some abstract force called sensation or pain — there is no unelaborated elementary 'awareness' of 'stimulation' — our sensors are part of the holism — outriders of the brain if you will — in that sense the human holism is ONE BIG ORGANIC BRAIN which reacts to its inner-world and outer-world environment. The human holism does not sense 'sensation' IT IS A SENTIENT creature that senses as a basic modality of the way it exists.

I don't know from where or from whence this human confusion originated between the fact that we exist and the way we exist started — did the abstractionist rot set in with the Greeks? Did they inherit the error of abstraction from the UR civilisation from which we all sprang? One can only speculate across the chasm of time. It's too late to bother about now — we are well and truly lumbered with it and we just have to live with it philosophically. In the street or the alehouse it doesn't matter anyway — everybody talks that way and the world keeps turning — the damage is done and may Plato rot in hell!


Gary.C. Moore:
Logic must always start from a premises as the major and minor premises of a syllogism. Logic can only work on assumption, presuppositions, axioms. These, supposedly, are propositions about how experience is perceived, that is, the conditions we can know identities and concepts that make differentiations on some ‘always already’ basis to give us something from raw undifferentiated experience to male major and minor premises from. This could be called a priori if it is not designated as the most solid and undeniable knowledge of all, sense impressions.

Jud Evans:
Yes - The ladder again. But I prefer: 'Holistic Sensing' to sense impression, for in my way of thinking about the world it is impossible for 'sense impressions' to exist [as you previously agreed with my concept of: 'sensed by the human holism' and that 'abstractions like 'collections' and 'heaps' and 'piles' and 'clouds' , etc., as non-existent in that it is the individuate particles that exist' so in that case how can there be a compendium of sensings? It is true that once we have stuck our hand in fire we never do it again — but this 'knowing' [I won't call it 'knowledge' as for me knowledge doesn't exist — only knowing human holisms exist] is remembered by the holism and it is the remembering holism that exists not its remembered sense impressions.


Gary.C. Moore:
Why is it designated as the most grounded knowledge of all?

Jud Evans:
Why? Well in my opinion it is not 'grounded knowledge' at all, but the knowing of the holism grounded in that most highest ground of all — the ground of existing as a functioning human holism present on earth.

Gary.C. Moore:
Because, while we are not forced to make any specific concepts, and therefore axioms, that is, we are not forced without sensation to think at all (and this can be found in ordinary, everyday situations of life where we just drift within sensations, regardless of the cause of that state); we, however, are forced to account for some sensations that we find over-ride any state we are in just as pain. When we are forced to account for pain, we necessarily identify one sensation by itself separate from everything else and, to understand the facts of the matter, must put it into a perceptual context which would be a ‘primitive universal’ according to Aristotle.

Jud Evans:
Yes, most of the time we drift, and it is only when some internal feature of the holism impinges its presence to the macro-mereology that we become aware of it — we feel pressure in the lower bowel and need to pass an evacuation — an ulcer in the mouth reminds us that we have a mouth, etc. We feel horny and want to do something about it OR entities from the environment affect and impinge upon the holism and we are moved to action from that which we sense going on around us.

Really enjoyed it Gary - when I read your words which echo within my head I become self-stimulated and my lazy old brain is forced to think.