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David Hume and Causality

שו"תDavid Hume and Causality
שאל לפני 8 שנים

peace,
The Rabbi mentions many times that the principle of causality cannot be learned from the senses. Therefore, he claims that the idealized vision within us is what teaches us this.
Although I agree that the principle of causality cannot be learned from the senses, why should we, following this understanding, conclude that it is the eyes of reason that notice this? After all, it is simple and clear logic that guides us to accept this simple principle; through a simple statistical calculation.
For example, when we see ball A hitting ball B and as a result ball B moves forward. David Hume's argument is that we cannot learn that A caused B. Because we only see a temporal advance between the events, but not a substantial connection of causation.
But what if we do an experiment to test this? And we test the two hypotheses:

  • Ball A did not cause B to move.
  • Ball A causes ball B to move.

Given the first hypothesis, the chance that ball B will move rather than something else happening (for example, staying in place) tends to 0. On the other hand, given the second hypothesis, the chance that ball B will move following A tends to 1.
We checked and discovered that ball B moved. So it is much more likely that ball A caused it. And here the principle of causality has been proven.
It is worth remembering that we encounter this experiment every moment. And every moment this principle resonates with us more and more.


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0 Answers
מיכי צוות ענה לפני 8 שנים
There is no way to measure such probabilities. You are just describing in a different way the same causal intuition we have (that things are likely to happen for a reason).

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