According to David Hume, all contents of the mind are perceptions. The very notion of Mind it is indistinguishable from some perception. These are divided into two types:
- impressions: they are original perceptions linked to sensations and, therefore, with a greater degree of intensity. It's the lived and it means to feel (feeling / external and feeling / internal – both refer to the present).
- ideas: they are “faded” or weakened images that reproduce sensations with a lesser degree of intensity, that is, they are copies of the impressions. idea means think (memory / past and imagination / future).
It means to say that all simple ideas come from their corresponding impressions, there are no innate ideas. Furthermore, in Locke one could still see the evidence of a kind of materialism, in which the mind was nothing more than the set of sensations of objects. In Hume, the subject is so enclosed in its particular representations that not even the affirmation of matter outside of man is possible. Let's see how this happens.
Memory for Hume is tied to impressions and even because of that they have a certain intensity. Smelling a rose is much more intense than remembering this experience. Even so diminished, the intensity is present. Memory is constituted by a homogenized whole of sensation, being, therefore, submitted to the order and form of the primary affection.
Imagination, on the other hand, is characterized by the notion of freedom. This notion allows man to compose and decompose, enlarge or reduce, copy and paste, etc., the qualities of prints. In this way, the imagination is not tied to primitive impressions, although it depends on them to exist. Therefore, you can create whatever you want by making a montage of images, inventing beings based on first ideas, regardless of whether they exist or not.
Understand how much there is a reversal of method in relation to the ancients: they judged their effects by the cause, that is, they went back to the first cause to explain the effect. With Hume, one starts from the effects to describe and limit the phenomenon. But thus, each phenomenon becomes an event so independent that there would be no way to link them by a kind of causality. Realize that the complex ideas of substance, quality and cause and effect they do not derive from experience, therefore they do not exist as such! Therefore, what makes us judge the cause and effect relationship between things we believe to exist is the mere HABIT. We cannot affirm the existence of real beings (substance) or even guarantee causality between them. Science is therefore destroyed and reason dethroned from its realm. The possibility of communication and understanding between particular subjects (intersubjectivity) is made through convention. Knowledge is universally impossible.
By João Francisco P. Cabral
Brazil School Collaborator
Graduated in Philosophy from the Federal University of Uberlândia - UFU
Master's student in Philosophy at the State University of Campinas - UNICAMP
Philosophy - Brazil School
Source: Brazil School - https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/filosofia/o-ceticismo-radical-destruicao-possibilidade-ciencia.htm