Status Updates From An Enquiry Concerning Human...

Note n/n:
Indeed, it was Alex O'Connor's insight to me that one's actions follows from one's will, but one's will IS causally determined, that convinced me of determinism.

Note 5/n:
since it does not matter whether one's will is causally determined. Millican teaches that Hume follows Hobbes and I remain to read how he does so: I also now recall that he touches on liberty and necessity at the tail end of the 'Abstract'. I can imagine that Hume will proceed as follows: that we constantly observe our actions following our will, so custom gives us the idea of liberty. Something like that.

Note 4/n:
anything that Wittgenstein said new, then?

Furthermore, Millican does me a great favour yet again: I would not have known that Hume followed Hobbes in the compatibilist theory, if it were not for Millican. Hobbes posited compatibilism in Leviathan using a somewhat cheap linguistic hack: if you define liberty as 'One's actions being directed according to one's will', then this is obviously compatibilist ...

Note 3/n:
broader instances in the past. I do not imagine a small child would infer that a positive earnings announcement CAUSES a drop in the stock price, just by observing one such instance (because the positive earnings were below the whisper number).

Hume anticipates Wittgenstein here by commenting that much disagreement in philosophy stems from ambiguity of the definitions of the terms we use. So, how is ...

Note 2/n:
we often ascribe causation irl after just observing ONE instance. In fact this is the root of much bad thinking in our politics, in our work, in our investing, and much of daily life. I myself have done this many times in the past. How do you explain this phenomenon then, in the strictly positive sphere?

This can only be explained if the singular instances we observed were derivations of similar, ...

Note 1/n:
I simply must challenge Hume on 1 point now: he says that custom is necessarily, positively how we have an idea of causation. He says the mind only gets an idea of causation after it observes a long course of uniform experience. From what I can read, it is not just normative that we should not infer causation from a single instance - he says that this is positively so.

But this is clearly not the case:

Note 5/n:
system, custom alone can create an internal impression that imprints an idea.

Finally, Hume maintains that a cause = if the 1st object had not been, the 2nd never had existed. This jives exactly with that Goodfellows episode 'The counterfactual show' that I watched in 2024, where I learned the profound concept from Stephen Kotkin that all causal explanations are counterfactual arguments BY DEFINITION.

Note 4/n:
capital which caused its trade deficit? I thought that the temporal priority of many events in real life are highly ambiguous but no one can doubt that they are causally intertwined. Thus I concur with Hume to drop this condition of temporal priority.

Millican's commentary that Hume had 'finally tracked down the impression of necessary connexion' also confuses me: I did not know that, within Hume's ...

Note 3/n:
I see from my review of the 'Abstract' that my June 2025 self had thought that priority in time is a pretty weak condition: I used the example of the US's strong trade deficit and corresponding capital surplus. Which one was prior in time? Did the US's relentless import purchases over the past several decades fuel its capital surplus, or did the US's highly attractive financial markets attract global ...

Note 2/n:
'necessary connexion'.

A further thought on Hume's 2 famous definitions of a cause (also refer to page xlv in the intro). Millican teaches me that in the Treatise, Hume had insisted that a cause must be contiguous with its effect as well as temporally prior, but he had dropped the latter condition from the Enquiry. (The 2 definitions in the Enquiry both concern themselves only with contiguity in space.)

Note 1/n:
Revisiting my review of the 'Abstract' this morning was so annoying - it revealed how many details I had forgotten and had missed in the Enquiry. Firstly, Hume had mentioned the terms 'power' and 'force' (in relation to necessary connexion) multiple times in the Abstract, so I should NOT have found those terms foreign in my current reading of the Enquiry, nor should I have not known what he means by ...

Note 5/n:
that this constant conjunction stops completely.

Again, Hume leaves his metaphysics of causation unclear: whether he thinks there ARE underlying causes at all, or just that the mind can never directly observe underlying causes.

Note 4/n:
to and thus harvest the long-run US equity risk premium was initially borne out of a presumably deep understanding on the underlying causes of the equity premium (e.g. systematic market risk, disaster risk, risks to human capital, the longer I play the higher my chances of winning etc), but now Hume is telling me that all those causal inferences are merely post-hoc narratives. I can conceive of a state ...

Note 3/n:
of causation (which I do not understand, because I clearly find within myself an idea of causation). All causal inferences can only be assigned AFTER observing constant conjunction - the mind can never have an insight into the underlying causal forces with no prior experience. This is deeply unsettling to me (not to say that I have not been unsettled by Hume for years now): my decision to gain exposure ...

Note 2/n:
Berkeley lie on the instrumentalism spectrum - just that Berkeley was a strict/ hard instrumentalist - but Berkeley pushed this philosophy to a completely opposite view on God, compared to Hume. Berkeley's instrumentalist view of God's laws is very exciting to me.

Finally, Hume is basically saying that all our ideas of causation are post-hoc! We never directly observe causation, so we don't have an idea...

Note 1/n:
So, this 'instrumentalism' philosophy as embraced by Hume (who was deeply influenced by Newton) is exactly just the pool-player analogy advanced by Friedman in 'The methodology of positive economics', then. (It's also quite funny that both Friedman and Hume alluded to pool and billiards.) Note that Hume is generalizing instrumentalism to ALL causes in the world.

It is interesting that both Hume and ...

Note 2/2:
great danger of the abstruse philosophy: that it can stray far from the logic of real life, cuz it has no common sense to rein it in. So this must mean that Hume thinks that his empiricism is not remote from common life and experience, then! Indeed, this is slightly disingenuous of Hume imo: for he is a champion of the abstruse philosophy himself, and his doctrine of skepticism is hardly common-sense.

Note 1/2:
Hume's first refutation of Malebranche's occasionalism is telling - it tells me that he thinks that common sense is a sufficient argument to refute a philosophical argument (Malebranche's philosophy being, if I understand it correctly, that God is constantly creating, willing, and moving all objects in the universe - not an unappealing theory to me).

Indeed, Hume had warned in Section 1 that this is a ...

Note 6/n:
situate my lack an idea of necessary connexion within Hume's epistemology. Millican explains to me that Hume often replaces the term 'necessary connexion' with just 'connexion', indicating that the key idea whose source he is seeking is not strictly necessary connexion, but the broader notion of connexion in general.

Note 5/n:
etc. Necessary connexion does NOT occur in the economic and social world, e.g., inflation from an expansion of the money supply, mean-reversion to intrinsic value of mispriced securities, default of a borrower with a shit DSCR, etc. Hence I certainly don't have an idea of necessary connexion in the latter world - my thoughts on this are very vague, but in a hazy sense, I was wrestling with how to ...

Note 4/n:
of dementia, or the simple observation that I cannot direct the organs in my body. The mind takes a convenient cognitive shortcut by forgetting this last point.

Also, Millican somewhat addresses 1 of the lingering thoughts I have. I observe that necessary connexion nearly always only occurs in the natural world, e.g. the collision of billiard balls, the free-fall of objects, heat resulting from a flame,...