Hume emphasized that the expectation of one thing following another does not lie in the things themselves, but in our mind. And expectation, as we have seen, is associated with habit. Going back to the child again, it would not have stared in amazement if when one billiard ball struck the other, both had remained perfectly motionless. When we speak of the 'laws of nature' or of 'cause and effect,' we are actually speaking of what we expect, rather than what is 'reasonable.' The laws of nature are neither reasonable nor unreasonable, they simply are. The expectation that the white billiard ball will move when it is struck by the black billiard ball is therefore not innate. We are not born with a set of expectations as to what the world is like or how things in the world behave. The world is like it is, and it's something we get to know
Jostein Gaarderlet's say you and a small child go to a magic show, where things are made to float in the air. Which of you would have the most fun?"
"I probably would."
"And why would that be?"
"Because I would know how impossible it all is."
"So... for the child it's no fun to see the laws of nature being defied before it has learned what they are."
"I guess that's right."
"And we are still at the crux of Hume's philosophy of experience. He would have added that the child has not yet become a slave of the expectations of habit; he is thus the more open-minded of you two. I wonder if the child is not also the greater philosopher? He comes utterly without preconceived opinions. And that, my dear Sophie, is the philosopher's most distinguishing virtue. The child perceives the world as it is, without putting more into things than he experiences
Both for a philosopher and for a scientist it can be important not to reject the possibility of finding a white crow. You might almost say that hunting for 'the white crow' is science's principal task
Jostein GaarderWhat you did was to draw a conclusion from a descriptive sentence--That person
wants to live too'--to what we call a normative sentence: 'Therefore you ought not to kill them.' From the point of view of reason this is nonsense. You might just as well say 'There are lots of people who cheat on their taxes, therefore I ought to cheat on my taxes too.' Hume said you can never draw conclusions from is sentences to ought sentences. Nevertheless it is exceedingly common, not least in newspaper articles, political party programs, and speeches.
as Hume expressed it. The mind is 'a kind of theater, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, slide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.' Hume pointed out that we have no underlying 'personal identity' beneath or behind these perceptions and feelings which come and go. It is just like the images on a movie screen. They change so rapidly we do not register that the film is made up of single pictures. In reality the pictures are not connected. The film is a collection of instants
Jostein Gaarderأجل, تتوجع البراعم عندما تتفتح
Jostein GaarderIndeed, there is pain when spring buds burst..."
Wasn't there a Swedish poet who had said something like that? Or was she Finnish?
ذبابة خضراء تطير حول شجيرات الورد.. لكنها لم تقف ساكنه أبداً.. كأنها لا تريد أن يتطفل عليها أحد
فصاح ميكا: إنها أصغر من الحروف.. أليس عجيباً أن كائناً بهذا الصغر, يكون حياً لهذه الدرجه؟؟
when we wonder where the world came from--and then discuss possible answers--reason is in a sense 'on hold.' For it has no sensory material to process, no experience to make use of, because we have never experienced the whole of the great reality that we are a tiny part of
We are--in a way--a tiny part of the ball that comes rolling across the floor. So we can't know where it came from.
Philosophy is the opposite of fairy tales
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