Descartes Mind/Body duality created a rupture between the rationalist and empiricist camps, and it was not until 1748 and David Humes Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding that the good ol human body got its due. The Enquiry was Humes attempt to make the ideas presented in his overlooked A Treatise of Human Nature more accessible to a wider audience. In both books he claimed that the immediacy of the human body and its sensory experience makes the material world the sole justification for any knowledge we might possess. Since the physical world is all we can know, anything we think is either an Impression (sensory experience and emotion) or an Idea (memories, beliefs, math). This means that everything we understand about the world is through the perception of either a Matter of Fact (experienced-based, non-contradictory events) or a Relation of Ideas (contradictory, mathematical truths not reliant on experience). As all we know is what we directly experience in any given moment, we can have no rational justification for believing in anything beyond that experience. Unfortunately, this includes the foundation of all our basic scientific knowledge: cause and effect. He said we cannot prove A causes B since all we have in our experience are two separate events, A and B. We cannot experience the causal mechanisms, so we cannot say we know them, therefore our science is based on probability; we are used to seeing two events occur together and it is only from habit that we believe they are somehow connected. In other words, the mind is not built to acquire truth, only to drive our habit of believing things are true.
David Wagner is an author/musician who splits his time between Oakland, CA and Istanbul, Turkey.
David has published two novels, both available on his website, and as a fan of movies, comics, and genre television, he is happy to be working with WhatCulture as a regular contributor.
