Exclusive "3:16" interview with David Hume (if he was alive today)

[C C]

https://www.3-16am.co.uk/blog/exclusive-...david-hume

INTRO: Generally regarded as one of the most important philosophers to write in English, David Hume is also well known  as an historian and essayist. A master stylist in any genre, his major philosophical works -- A Treatise of Human Nature, the Enquiries concerning Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals, as well as his posthumously published Dialogues concerning Natural Religion  -- remain widely and deeply influential.

EXCERPT (of interview): [...] 3:16: So does your philosophical skepticism put you at odds with contemporary scholars? 

DH: Yes. I am confounded with that forlorn solitude in which I am placed in my philosophy. I have exposed myself to the enmity of all metaphysicians, logicians, mathematicians, and even theologians. 

3:16: So what principles help you think from what seems to be a hopeless skeptical position? 

DH: It’s not easy Richard. I say let us fix our attention out of ourselves as much as possible. 

3:16: Can we do that? 

DH: Well no, we really never advance a step beyond ourselves; nor can conceive any kind of existence but these perceptions which have appeared in that narrow compass: This is the universe of the imagination, nor have we any idea but what is there produced. Accordingly, an opinion or belief may be most accurately defined as a lively idea related or associated with a present impression; and is more properly an act of the sensitive than of the cognitive part of our natures. 

3:16: So belief isn’t really cognitive?

DH: I’d put it like this: Belief in general consists in nothing but the vivacity of an idea. Again, the idea of existence is the very same with the idea of what we conceive to be existent — any idea we please to form is the idea of a being; and the idea of a being is any idea we please to form. 

3:16: So what’s the difference between ideas about the world and the world itself on your view?

DH: ‘The world’ as in an external existence? 

3:16: Yes. 

DH: Well, as to the notion of an external existence, when taken for something specifically different from our perceptions, we have shown its absurdity: And what we call a mind is nothing but a heap or collection of different perceptions united together by certain relations, and supposed, tho' falsely to be endowed with a perfect simplicity. 

3:16: Can we be certain of anything then? 

DH: The only existence of which we are certain are perceptions. 

3:16: What about the self? 

DH: The self? Well, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. If any one thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him. I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle of perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement. 

3:16: So Descartes goes wrong in thinking he can pick out a grounding principle beyond our perceptions? 

DH: Well yes... (MORE - missing details, interview)

[Magical Realist]

I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.

Hume's error here is in thinking of perceptions as self-contained or windowless monadic units. They are not in my opinion. Every perception is a stimulated change of our body--a sudden occurrence of difference. They are in this sense open-ended and windowed and responsive to a real other-than-oneself world. Perception is a transcendent experience of reality having an effect on us. We see the chair because there IS a chair before us. Being manifests its presence thru sentient events. We are here and the chair is there thru this primal pre-conscious interaction between us.