A Treatise of Human Nature

I was reminded of Hume’s work after reading the Taleb’s The Black Swan, and I’m very much unfamiliar with Enlightenment philosophy other than Voltaire’s Candide (which is very different from this). Hume’s Treatise is his most important work, and some of its main themes are on human knowledge and understanding, on human passions, free will, morals, and much more. From a modern standpoint, some of his ideas are abstract and somewhat obscure to comprehend. But, there are some key themes that Hume championed that are relevant and important, such as the ideas of empirical skepticism on using science to study human thought and action, and on the inability for reason to be the panacea for the whims of passion, and most famously noting that humans’ ability of induction is wholly irrational and merely a mental heuristic. The book is heavy philosophy and written in old English so I’ve read it in a fast-slow kind of way, where I scrutinize certain sections for its arguments while skimming through other less interesting sections.

The book has a myriad of important results and because of that most of the important ideas are reflected, debated, and polished in future thinkers, sometimes rendering them less impactful when reading the original. In terms of one idea that really stuck with me, it is that beliefs are merely more forceful and vivid conceptions. For example, you can conceive of a scenario where Hitler won WWII and we’re all speaking German, but you don’t believe it; you believe in a scenario where the Allies won, because it’s repeatedly drilled into your brain of the vivid details of the event, of credible people all saying that this was the case. Since beliefs are merely more forceful conceptions, we have scenarios where interrogated people, questioned on the same crime scene over and over, begin to believe false memories of seeing the crime happen; or, when memories lose their vividness through time, you believe them less and start to doubt. It’s interesting to note that beliefs can be entirely irrational since the strength of the belief doesn’t depend on logic or reason; maybe it’s a factor to why we can’t fully convince others to adopt different beliefs.