Episode #053 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday, and I hope you love the show.

So, it would be very tempting for us to take what we’ve learned about David Hume so far and label him just a big, fat, cheerful dude that spent his life bagging on religion, a Jesus hater. But David Hume wasn’t a Jesus hater. He didn’t even know the guy. But if we want to understand David Hume, if we want to get to the bottom of it, it’s important to understand what David Hume was trying to do during his lifetime. What questions was he trying to answer? Now, I want to begin the show today with one of the most iconic and provocative quotes that ever left the mouth of David Hume. Now, this episode we’ll look at this quote and what it means from multiple different angles. But I want to say it once now just to bookend the episode because I think it’s very illuminating of the aims of David Hume and how, ultimately, he set his sights on something much, much larger than merely religion with his work.

“If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask ourselves, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.” Now, I could be wrong here, but it sounds like old Humey over there is getting a little extreme in his old age. Well, don’t worry if you didn’t catch exactly what he said about the criteria for when you should throw something in the fireplace. I promise by the end of this episode it’s all going to make sense. So, with that, as promised, let’s talk about the soul.

It’s hard to know how to begin this. How about this? I am not a hamster running around on a wheel at Petco. Alright? I’m more than that. You know what, do an experiment. Go down to Petco. Look into the eyes of one of them hamsters. Is there anything going on in the mind of that hamster? No. Ah, but look into my eyes. Oh, what a difference. Ask me what kind of music I like. Ask me what kind of poetry I like. Ask me to tell you how I’m feeling today. Ask me to tell you about my favorite memories and my goals and ambitions. And I can relay to you all kinds of thoughts that a hamster living in Petco could never even dream of thinking about. Like, seriously, what is that hamster thinking in the cage at Petco? Probably nothing. He’s probably thinking, “Wow, this is a really long wheel that I’m running in a circle on.”

The point is, there’s an obvious difference between us human beings and the rest of the animal kingdom. People have all kinds of different ways of defining what exactly this difference is. But whatever qualities you use, there must be some explanation. And how about this explanation right here? There’s an incorporeal soul that is responsible for it. Now, this word “soul”—the word “soul” has been hijacked all throughout history. It’s been used to mean a wide variety of different things. In fact, it’s often that way by design. It’s a tactic that people use to avoid criticism. The concept itself is so mysterious and transient, it’s been used to mean so many different things throughout history, that to even leverage a criticism against the concept of a soul existing—it always leaves the believer in the soul with an out. “Oh, you’re not talking about what I mean when I say soul, my personal definition. Yeah, of course, those Greeks over there, they were primitive. They didn’t understand what a soul was. They didn’t know what they were talking about. But my soul, mine’s different.”

For anyone thinking about these things in 2015 like we are, for anybody that wants to be fair to other people’s beliefs, for anybody that really wants to remain openminded about all the possibilities out there, you can start to feel a little weird and frustrated when you’re having these conversations with people. Do you know what I’m talking about? How do you get to the bottom of something that’s so elusive? How do you criticize something that’s such a moving target with such a fleeting definition attached to it? Make no mistake, this tactic is not just something reserved for people talking about the soul throughout history. There are ton—I mean, a simple Google search will bring up dozens of pseudo-intellectual scientists in today’s world that do this with some buzzword that they’re trying to protect. They’ll say something like the word “consciousness” 185 times in some lecture that they give. They’ll never define terms. And it just creates this climate where it’s very difficult to lob a complaint against what they’re saying because it’s difficult to know what you’re even criticizing at all. And to be fair, I don’t even think that guy knows what you’re criticizing, but it’s convenient for him, you know? He can always distance himself from weak aspects of his argument. He can do that Heisman Trophy pose and stiff arm away any criticism.

Anyway, this game that people like this play was something that David Hume recognized and saw all the time even in the 1700s. The reason I say this is because even though David Hume was skeptical about the notion of us having a soul at all—that’s in keeping with the general skepticism that he had surrounding everything that we think we know—David Hume doesn’t spend much of his time in his work refuting the possibility of us having a soul. He spends most of his time refuting individual characteristics that people assign to this soul that they attach to it after they already believe in it. This looks familiar to us, right? It’s just like all the other arguments from David Hume. Not denouncing the idea of a God existing at all, but just pointing out all the unfounded assumptions we’re making about that God once we’ve assented to the belief. Not denouncing the idea of there being an intelligent designer at all, but pointing out all the unfounded assumptions we’re making about what that designer must be like once we believe in it.

Although, no doubt, we should remain skeptical about all of this, about us even having a soul, Hume spends most of his time in his work attacking the qualities that he thinks people are tacking on lazily after the fact. He said, “Matter, therefore, and spirit are at bottom equally unknown, and we cannot determine what qualities inhere in one or the other.” So, I guess I kind of skipped forward there a bit. But what he’s doing in this quote is addressing the typical Platonic dualism that we’ve talked about on this show before. You know, we look into ourselves as humans, and we see that we have things like thoughts. These thoughts are obviously not made of anything. They’re not made of matter. So, as humans, we can’t be only made of matter. We are a mixture of matter and soul. And just because our physical bodies die, that doesn’t mean that our souls die. No, they go on and do whatever souls do after your physical body dies. As we talked about, it was this idea from Plato that made Platonism so easily compatible with Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all throughout the Middle Ages.

What Hume is saying, though—ah!—is that even if this soul that they’re talking about exists, what is matter? What is spirit? We can’t even answer questions about what these things are, let alone be making grandiose assumptions about what attributes they must have. And one of the most common attributes people attach to their definition of a soul is that it is immortal, right? They say things like, “I can’t imagine not existing after I die.” They say that the soul is sown from a different kind of cloth, one not bound by these same limitations that matter and other things in the universe are beholden to that causes them to parish. The soul that explains these qualities about my personality is immortal.

Now, Hume—in very Humean fashion, by the way, he’s willing to concede all sorts of unfounded points so that he can point out further assumptions that the person’s making—Hume in his response to this is even willing to grant that we have an immortal soul. This just goes to show how many assumptions he saw in this way of thinking. He said, “The soul therefore if immortal, existed before our birth; and if the former existence no ways concerned us, neither will the latter.” Now, what he’s saying here is, okay, you got me. You got me! We have an immortal soul. But why should we assume that that soul’s existence concerns us in the slightest bit after we’re dead? I mean, after all, the matter that makes up our bodies existed long before we were ever alive, right? It was fine doing other things. We weren’t concerned with it.

Like, for example, the atoms that made up your body when you were an infant at one point maybe belonged to a cow until your mom ate that cow when she was pregnant, and a little piece of that cow went through her stomach and digestion or—I don’t even know how it works. I’m not a doctor—but a little piece of that cow became a little piece of you in your mother’s womb. Now, on that same note, the atoms that make up your body—they’re going to continue to exist long after you’re dead, right? For example, when our bodies die, they get put in the ground. Worms eat us. Worms poop us out. We fertilize the ground. Someone grows beets on that plot of land 1,000 years later. The beet plant consumes us. We become a little tiny piece of this reddish vegetable that nobody likes. That is the fate that awaits all of you.

It’s a very colorful, exciting narrative about what happens to our bodies after we die, but you get the point. After we die, the matter that makes up our bodies continues to live on. What that matter eventually does or becomes—it doesn’t concern us at all. Yet for some reason when we assume that the soul is immortal and that we had nothing to do with it before we were born, just like the matter, why should we assume that we have anything to do with it after we die? There’s tons of narratives that you could assign here. What if souls are recycled? What if as soon as your life ends, the soul looks for another life form to attach itself to. You can think of dozens of examples here. But nonetheless, for most people living in Hume’s time and many people living in today’s world, this wouldn’t even be close to an adequate explanation by Hume. The reason why is because their unique definition of the soul that they’ve arrived at is not something that’s separate from you. It is you. You are the soul.

You know, I have a good friend that believes this. When you ask him what he is, when I say, “What are you exactly? Are you your body? What are you?” he says he is a spiritual being. He doesn’t have a soul; he is a soul that’s inhabiting this physical body for this very short period of time. He’s sort of sitting on a chair behind his eyes, looking out at the world, experiencing it. Now, what my friend is doing when he says this is something that was very prevalent in the thinking in the Middle Ages. We talked about this. He’s conflating the idea of a soul with the idea of a self. But David Hume, leave it to him, he’s even skeptical of the idea of a self existing. He asked questions like “What is this thing that we call our self? What is it? Does it even exist?” It’s actually very Eastern of him.

On that same note, there’s a whole group of people in today’s world, highly respected, that think that David Hume’s philosophy may have been highly influenced by Buddhism. There’s a really interesting episode of a podcast called Philosophy Bites with Nigel Warburton about this very idea. They point to the similarities between David Hume’s conception of what the self is to the famous, famous Buddhist dialogues between King Milinda and Nagasena. The story goes that King Milinda and Nagasena are having a conversation; they’re talking about the self. And the King looks at her, and he says, “Look, obviously the self exists, because we’re talking right now. And there’s obviously two sides to this conversation. If you don’t have a self, who am I talking to right now?” And Nagasena says back to him, “Well, how did you come to court today? How did you get into this room so that you could have a conversation with me?” The King says back, “Well, I rode in on my chariot this morning.” And Nagasena says, “Okay, what is that chariot besides just a collection of wheels and axels and the seat and pieces of wood combined together? Is that chariot something more than just the collection of those ingredients?” And the King says, “No, no, I guess it’s not.” Why should we assume that we’re anything more than just a collection of fleeting thoughts and emotions and experiences and everything that you see when you look inward?

Now, what David Hume’s really doing here is refuting Descartes. Remember Descartes’ famous cogito, ergo sum? I think, therefore I am. Well, the reason Descartes is even saying that at all is as a rebuttal to radical skepticism. He thinks this is one of the only things you can say that nobody can really disagree with. But again, leave it to David Hume to find a way to disagree. And the thing that he takes issue with is the idea of us knowing that there is an “I.” I think, therefore I am. When Descartes asks his readers to look within themselves and, obviously, they will find that there is a self present there, David Hume says, no, what happens when he looks within himself is he just sees a bunch of thoughts and associations and ideas seemingly bundled together. Why is there necessarily some sort of continuity there, some self that possesses all of these things?

There it is again, that same skepticism that Hume has brought to all of these different discussions that we’ve talked about over the last couple episodes. There it is again, this thing known to history as Hume’s fork: the idea that if someone makes a claim and it’s not instantly demonstrable or capable of being verified that we should “commit it to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.” And when you think about that maxim for a second, that doesn’t leave very much stuff to work with, does it? But we want to know the truth. We’re human beings. Where does that leave us in our quest to know? Can we know anything? Can we even know simple things like whether anything exists at all?

Well, for many people, Hume is the end of a long stint of inquiry by the continental rationalists and the British empiricists. We started out with Descartes saying, “I think, therefore I am.” And then he uses that fact that he exists as a foundation to create an entire rationalist-system skyscraper on top of that foundation of things that we must know if that is true. And as you know, John Locke comes along after him. He questions that skyscraper. He says we’re born with a tabula rasa, a blank slate. We don’t have any innate ideas, and ultimately, any knowledge that we can claim to have is at some level derived from experience. And then Berkeley comes along, stirs up the pot. He says if knowledge is ultimately based on experience, how can we know the universe is existing if we’re not experiencing it? Lucky for us, God is always experiencing it.

All David Hume is doing here is just taking this line of thinking one step further. David Hume would say, we can’t be certain that anything exists. But once you realize that, who really cares, anyway? This is when we find out what he was getting at with all this skepticism. David Hume would say that once we get to this point where we acknowledge that we can’t have certain knowledge about anything, we still find ourselves living in the world, right? I mean, sure, love what you’re doing, Mr. Hume. I think it’s lovely you can be so skeptical about things ad infinitum. Great. But we’re still alive, right? I mean, I still got to drive to work on Monday. I still got to pick my kids up from the pool when they’re done swimming. We as a species still have to find the best way that we can to find connections and relationships between things in the natural world. Even if we can’t know these things for certain, the benefits of doing so are just undeniable.

David Hume would have agreed with this wholeheartedly. He would have said, look, all this skepticism that I’m coming with, it’s not for the sake of being extreme or annoying or standoffish to people. There are good intentions behind it. What it is is an advocacy for open-mindedness. The rigorous skepticism is just a means of making us never complacent, never willing to deem our thoughts on any matter an evolutionary end point. You know, no further progress is capable of being made in this field. We’re done. Case closed. So, once we positioned ourselves atop this honest foundation that Hume lays out for us, how do we make sense of the world? That’s the question you’re left with.

And David Hume would say, custom is the great guide of human life. Now, what he means by that is that we may not be able to say with unquestionable certainty that pool ball 1 caused the movement of pool ball 2 to move across the table, but the fact that we’ve observed it happening 100 times out of 100, the fact that it customarily happens, allows us to be pretty sure that pool ball 1 is causing the movement of pool ball 2. Not certain! We shouldn’t attach our egos to our ideas. We should always be willing and excited about being proven wrong about pool ball 1 causing the movement of pool ball 2. But in our quest as human beings to make sense of this maelstrom of seemingly random phenomena happening all around us, custom should be our guide.

David Hume famously said a wise man always proportions his belief to the evidence. Now, hearing this maxim uttered by Mr. Hume, it’s obvious that he was a huge proponent of science. I mean, a wise man always proportions his belief to the evidence? That sounds like something people would say today. I mean, if Richard Dawkins would read—I mean Richard Dawkins would read that quote, and as he’s reading it for the first time would just start nodding emphatically to himself. “Yes, jolly good. Yes.” And actually, this is not just Richard Dawkins, alright? When you watch the four horsemen of the atheist apocalypse in a debate setting, they quote David Hume all the time. But the main difference between these guys and David Hume is that Hume didn’t have as much of an agenda to promote science as the means to arrive at understanding about the world.

Now, hold on. I’m not saying these guys wouldn’t be openminded to a better way of arriving at understanding. And I’m not saying David Hume wouldn’t have agreed with them if he lived today. What I’m saying is that in the historical context of David Hume in the 1700s, he wouldn’t have had the same need or desire to deem science to be the absolute correct answer as much as these people do in a debate setting 300 years later where no better alternative has come forward yet. The important thing to take from this is, David Hume saw science and religion as two things that aim to do the same thing. That doesn’t make them both equally valid to Hume. He obviously would have seen science as a much more reliable means of arriving at understanding. But he would have seen these two things as just two possibilities of the potentially millions of different systems we might use to arrive at understanding about the world around us.

Hume would say, say what you want about the verifiability of religion, but it does give you a perceived understanding of your place within the natural world. If you’re born into the world with a blank slate and you quickly find yourself with a strong aversion to dying, living in this world, and lions and lightning bolts and tons of volatile phenomena all around you potentially threaten your existence—if you’re living in that world, being told that that lightning bolt that just struck the ground over there, oh, that was just Zeus punishing a cockroach or something—that lightning bolt was just a means to an end of some God that loves you—that can bring you a lot of comfort in that setting the same way that science’s perceived understanding of the world in the 1800s gave us comfort in that setting and was ultimately proven wrong.

Again, Hume definitely would have seen science as a more useful means of gleaning this understanding, but he would have had a strong caveat attached to that. Look, these two things, science and religion, these are only two possibilities of arriving at understanding about the world. And let’s always be openminded to arriving at something better than them. This was the optimistic, pioneering spirit that pervaded the thinking of this time period. For the first time in really ever, Newtonian physics are offering a new way of understanding the order in the universe that doesn’t necessarily involve a God constantly maintaining it. For the first time, we’re starting to have ways to explain these experiences that human beings have when interacting with the world that don’t have anything to do with having an immortal soul. This is the world David Hume is living in, a new frontier.

This really is the linchpin of his entire anthology of work, to find the most reliable means of arriving at human understanding about the world around us. We’ve been led down a dark path in the past. And to make sure that never happens again, let’s be ruthlessly skeptical, openminded to new possibilities, openminded to the idea that we were wrong before, and let’s proportion our belief to the evidence that we have wherever it leads. Custom is the great guide of human life. The more predictable and repeatable that custom is, the more sure we can be of how valid it is. Sure, short-term variance may allow an experiment to be done once, and it might produce a strange result. And we might believe something incorrect for a period of time. But eventually, you do the experiment enough times, and custom will always shine through.

Now, silly me, I’m always trying to find some practical takeaway from these things. And pardon me if this seems like I’m taking too much liberty with Hume’s ideas here. But I think in addition to the point that he’s making about finding the most reliable means of arriving at understanding as a species, I think it’s analogous to our personal lives as well and very useful. Think about what he’s saying when he says custom is the great guide of human life. The more experiences that we have, the more honest, reliable, full, and rich our understanding of the universe becomes. It’d be very easy for a scientist to do one experiment and then never do another experiment and spend the rest of his life trying to validate what he already thinks he knows. It’d be very easy for a scientist to restrict herself to only one tiny little subsection of science, never understanding anything about the world outside of this little—about daffodils or something. But wouldn’t some of that information about the rest of the world at least potentially allow that daffodil scientist to do their job better?

Now, on that same note, I have a friend who’s in school to become a graphic designer right now. Now, this guy is ambitious. He doesn’t just want to be a graphic designer. He wants to be one of the greatest illustrators of all time. He has dreams of creating these elaborate, highly creative posters depicting these incredible scenes that he dreams up in his head. This is what he wants to do for the rest of his life. Now, in this dedicated pursuit of his, he’s decided to close himself off from the rest of the world. He doesn’t want to learn about history or economics or basically anything new, really. He doesn’t want to go out and experience new things. He doesn’t want to travel and see other cultures. He just wants to work on his illustrations and then, every once in a while, look at what a couple other designers around him have created recently and draw some inspiration off of that.

Now, he’s not the only guy that does this by any means. I’m not saying he is. People do it all the time with other stuff. They close themselves off to anything outside of their small town or from anything that’s different than this collection of social conventions that they were born into. But what’s wrong with this insular approach to understanding the world if you want to do anything creative? Whenever you create anything, where does that come from? Whenever you have an idea at all, where does that come from? Does it come from somebody else’s brain somehow? Are you channeling with telepathy somebody else’s ideas? No, it comes from your brain. And when you’re coming up with an idea for this new, creative, visionary illustration that you’re working on, the only ideas you could ever possibly have are derived only from the experiences that you’ve had. So, going outside of that box that you live in, broadening your horizons, experiencing new things, if you’re a creative person, why wouldn’t you want as many experiences to pull from as you possibly could? Why wouldn’t you want to be illustrating the most honest depiction of the universe possible?

And in that same way, in the vein of David Hume, if you’re trying to arrive at the most accurate and most three-dimensional understanding of the cause of the movement of pool ball 2 in this crazy world that we live in, wouldn’t our understanding of it be more full and more honest and more rich the more experiences that we have with it?

Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.