Wednesday, September 26, 2007

THE END OF SKEPTICISM

David Hume was an 18th century philosopher considered to be among the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy.

He was the penultimate examiner of the limitations of the human mind. His great question was whether it was possible for the human mind to really know anything for sure.


His main line of inquiry was aimed at our capacity to know religious truth but his scalpel tore out the connective tissue of all human knowledge. David Hume's work led to a fundamental skepticism that marks most western minds to this day.

The human mind is indeed a limited thing whether singularly pitted against difficult puzzles of our universe or collectively carrying accumulated knowledge.

To start, it is best to describe the human mind to be a device that employs an array of transducers to experience the universe in a way that is particular to the needs of the human being. Because of the nature of man, the universe is necessarily going to be a particular thing to man. The universe may be more than we can perceive and it may in fact be less than we perceive but its expression to our human minds is reasonable in as far we measure 'reasonableness'. We do indeed have the faculties to fathom our place in the world because the information we gather through our senses uniformly follows understandable laws as does the phenomena that we perceive only through instruments and inference.

While it is true that the human mind cannot fully know all that there is in reality, it is not true that the human mind cannot know more about reality than the information our five senses can provide. It is plain to see that much of what we do know (and feel confident is true) is the accumulation of knowledge held in minds of other human beings as experiential information but delivered to our own minds as conferred knowledge.

To suggest otherwise (as Hume does) is to suggest that any suspicion or thought formed within the mind of a man has absolutely no chance of bearing confirmation in reality. Our own daily experience shows us that notions formed in our minds very often can be counted on to match what reality delivers. This is a strange argument but please bear with me.

A scientist for example may directly observe the effects of an atom-smashing experiment and thus hold experiential information in his mind. The scientist's paper that is released for study by the rest of us would merely represent conferred knowledge but is reasonably accepted as actual knowledge. Counting on this information very often will bear out our own examination of reality.

This suggests that there is a reasonably dependable continuity between the uptake of information from reality, the holding of the information in the form of human thoughts and then the measuring of those human thoughts against the reality from whence it came. Similarly (in the example given before the last one), proposals of reality formed exclusively within the human mind (excluding what is deliberately designed to be fantasy) can be measured against reality and found to match quite well. There is a continuity between the substance of reality and the corresponding thought form in the human mind whether it is gathered from reality or whether is formed exclusively within the human mind.

David Hume was (and is) famous for attacking the basis on which much of religious thought was formed. He proposed that any claims that Christianity in particular made regarding ultimate reality were simply fiction because the human mind could not cross the bounds of experiential knowledge to understand questions such as of origins, purposes and God.

In my humble view, what David Hume supposed (and wrongly so) was that there was a separation between the universe and the information about the universe.

David Hume's limited supposition may have been due to the limitations of the time in which he lived.

We who live beyond the space age, beyond the atomic age, and beyond the human genome mapping age know that our universe is not primarily composed of matter but rather that it is composed of information. In other words, what appears to be matter and everything else in our universe is nothing but the imposition of information on nothing. (I suspect that even energy itself, properly understood, will reveal itself to be nothing but information but this is the subject for a blogger living far into the future to comment on).

The basis of generic skepticism is that there is an unbridgeable gap between the human mind and reality due to the disparate nature of reality and information.

David Hume's skepticism (along with the skepticism of most other thinkers who followed in his tracks) is going to be unable to travel along with us into the age of the Universe-as-Information.

Reality and information are turning out not be separate after all.

This suggests that when you know something, it is very likely that you can really know it.

(Wikipedia was an important source of information for this post)

posted by Wild 3:19:00 PM |

DON'T TAZE ME BRO

posted by Wild 3:18:00 PM |

home