Discussion of Hume ideas?

Question

IHume believes that if an individual has a desire and can act on said desire thatn they posses free will. However,if Hume's definition is correct, a person can count as free even though the determinations of his will and any resulting action are themselves determined or fixed by factors outside of the person's control. For Hume, all of our actions, like everything else that happens in nature, proceed according to fixed regularities. Given these regularities or laws of human nature, and given some initial conditions before even the birth of the person, everything he or she will do is predictable, at least in principle. It would be ridiculous to think that such actions or such a person could count as free. Since Hume's definition of liberty or freedom allows that such actions can count as free, this shows that Hume's definition of liberty is wrong.

I was just wondering what some of you though about this. I've been reading an equiry concerning human understanding.

Answer 1

Hmmm, Hume is neither a hypocrite or a wishful thinker, in fact he is probably the greatest philosopher who wrote in the English language.

Hume in his philosophy tends to strip away comfortable notions of the everyday and uses his scepticism to point out the absurdities and inconsistencies in what people usually call common sense. He is not a pure empiricist but can be categorised as such in opposition to the 'Idealists' who in my mind are mere gadflies when it comes to the heavy lifting in Philosophy.

Hume was meticulous in showing where arguments led and it is interesting that both the questioner and first responder here cannot exactly say where he went wrong, he did not. Determinism has a long and noble place in the history of ideas and as with causation Hume was rigorous in showing that what we normally understand as common sense, is not justified at all. Having showed that scepticism is fully justified Hume often retreated from such extreme positions by appealing to enjoyment of life as more important than being fully 'correct'.
Free will may well be an illusion, the jury is still out.

Answer 2

Well, quantum physics shows that things are not so deterministic, and is impossible to predict exactly what will happen in response to an event.

Your post made me think of the proof that came out of Princeton recently. Written by John Conway and Simon Kochen, the "Free Will Theorem" proves that if the observer of an observable (discreet quantum event) has free will, then all particles do and that is why you cannot determine the out come exactly; the particle has yet to decide where it will be until it is observed.

I asked a friend of mine, a heavy math head who is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the U of Michigan, what he thought and his words were "John Conway is The Man when it comes to math."

Just a few comments to spice up the discussion. :)

Answer 3

All though in your description of 'Hume's Ideas' you do not specifically mentions his adamant empricism, I must (albeit reluctanctly) release them for criticism, as concerns for the rest of his philosophies apply to his core beliefs, do they not?

Hume's perceptions of freedom, although inspiring and lined with a spice of early existentialism, completely fall apart when taken in context with his radical skepticism of even mathematics (later revoked). The problem with equating empricism and freedom is that empiricists see the physical world as the only real, knowable thing, the senses as the only read, knowable source of intellect. This conflicts with the concept of freedom, as any object is bound by physical nature and the laws of mechanics. Considering that a man 'controls' a brain composed of matter he did not create, by Hume's original logic he cannot be free.

Hence, Hume is either a hypocrite or a wishful thinker of his own preordained notions.