Thoughts on Hume

Hume-

Impressions = experiences

perception of self. Many people have presupposed perceptions of self. Many consider Hume to be archaic. 17th century worldview presupposes science and science's worldview of understanding nature. Wood has a view of nature as mechanistic, Hume shares Wood's view. With Hume it's presupposed. People often jump to Wood's presuppositions without questioning his initial reasoning. Science is essentially mathematics applied to nature. Ledger Wood says everything is mechanistic; man is just a cog in nature's mechanism. Hume buys into the same view of nature. Too many people see nature as mechanistic, although nature is a mechanism. This is the modern/mechanistic world view. People see the uniformities in nature and jump to the conclusion that everything in the world is mechanistic. When Hume looks at the world like this, he assumes that personality can be interpreted mathematically, broken down into units, by some kind of scientific formula. Hume believes that people can't have a personal identity. An atomic unit of sense experience for Hume is an impression.

We say we see the whole object, Hume sees the parts. Hume tends to think in terms of atoms of experience. Atomic units as impressions. We are aware of the self residing in all of us, the focus of our activity. Hume sees a "sequence of points." Every idea has to be rooted in an impression (Hume). "Show me the impression of a self, if there's no impression, there's no idea." There is no self, all we have are simple impressions (Hume). Hume wants to redefine the self. He calls it a bundle of impressions. Self = bundle of impressions. If there's a general idea, it has to be rooted in an impression. Hume's goal is to reduce everything to individual impression. Hume is an advocate of behaviorism. Hume takes consciousness as a sequence of "nows." Now is discrete, moment by moment broken into different atomic units. The self changes moment by moment, for every "now" is separate and different. There's no collective self underlying our activities and behavior. Unless you break something down to its atomic unit, it is indiscernible.