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Comment by sevenfive | Hacker News Reader

> There's some evidence that philosophy majors score pretty high on the GMAT (for graduate admissions to business school) and on the LSAT (for law school), as well as pretty good on the GRE Verbal and GRE Analytical Writing test

As a philosophy major you should be the first to point out this doesn't imply causation.

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> you should be the first to point out this doesn't imply causation

Nah, I'd rather just go nuclear on causation, with the assistance of Hume...

"...experience only teaches us, how one event constantly follows another; without instructing us in the secret connexion, which binds them together, and renders them inseparable... It is allowed on all hands that there is no known connexion between the sensible qualities and the secret powers; and consequently, that the mind is not led to form such a conclusion concerning their constant and regular conjunction, by anything which it knows of their nature."

Why doesn't Hume believe in human mind grasping causal reasoning? Even in non-scientific settings, causal reasoning is fundamental for humans.

Humes point is that we can't perceive causal relationships, even if we think we do. We can only perceive events, and then our mind constructs causal relationships on top of them. But these relationships are not inherent to the world, they are only in our minds.

Judea Pearl wrote a whole book about proving causality (and when it can't be proven).

A rough summary is available as a YouTube video:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HUti6vGctQM

Hume's point is much more fundamental: you can't know if the world is indeed governed by 'natural laws'. Maybe the sun will just not rise tomorrow, ignoring all of the causal relationships we think we 'discovered'. There is no way to prove it will.

Or in more modern terms: we didn't discover anything inherent in nature, we invented models for prediction. Which are very useful, but don't tell anything about how the world 'really is'.

And, to be very explicit: this includes probability theory. You can prove that a series of observations from the past follows some pattern that matches the definition of probabilistic causality. But you can't prove that the events in the future will continue to fit that same pattern. So again you cannot prove anything about how the world 'really is'.

They are very very closely related, and philosophers and Pearl cite each other on the topic of causation, but Hume and philosophers are usually concerned with a slightly different problem. Hume is concerned about the nature of the necessity between any cause and effect which seemed to be implied by our experience of events. Whereas Pearl (much less knowledgeable about Pearl) is interested in how we can model events to give us high confidence in the relation applying in a particular case while leaving the topic of necessity and the fundamental nature of causation to the side and assuming a much more vague /ad hoc notion of what causation is.

That is true in the absolute sense, but untrue in the relative sense of day to day life. If there is smoke, there must be fire - people know that. We apply causal reasoning in day to day life. It's probably a cultural thing, though, it does not appear spontaneously in the brain, it's learned.

Hume's idea is that you can only ever directly experience events co-occuring in time, but "causation" is not something you can actually ever see itself.

In practice, it is useful to predict when a given action is likely to achieve a particular result. Or I guess we can't know anything, because what is knowing really...

This is the real problem. Philosophers can’t prove their own existence to themselves, how can they be expected to prove anything else?

Descartes would like to have a word with you :)

The guy who in the end just said "Fuck it, a Wizard (God) did it."? It's really interesting to see the logical hole he digs for himself in the book but then cops out in the end with a "Well, God is good so he wouldn't let something bad happen to us so we must exist."

He ended with that about non-first-person existants. His argument works for proving oneself exists to oneself.

He basically defined existence as thinking, then turned it into a tautology. And then it blew up in his face when he realized that he couldn't prove anything else was thinking. And in fact even if there wasn't some devil tricking him (ala brain in a box hooked to the Matrix), things like rocks and water could never exist.

His entire philosophy was flawed right from the start. But it usually is. That's why so many philosophy texts take the first chapter (or volume) refuting philosophers who came before them.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark_argument. You kind of have it backwards, he first concluded that he existed (I think therefore I am). Then because of that (and other arguments), he believed god exists and is good, so he wouldn’t deceive his senses.

They know that they know nothing, so the question of proofs is somewhat moot.

Not really. That was just Socrates being Socrates and being all humble about his knowledge. Apart from him I don't remember any othe philosopher adopting that stance.

> I don't remember any othe philosopher adopting that stance.

Peter Unger's book "Ignorance" (Oxford University Press, 1975) is probably the best modern defence of extreme skepticism.

Also, Unger is pretty fun to read.

"This is the real problem. Philosophers can’t prove their own existence to themselves, how can they be expected to prove anything else?"

Whereas the rest of us are easily able to prove to our full satisfaction that atoms didn't exist, asbestos was safe, white flour no different than brown... etc, etc. It's not just possible for there to be too much certainty in the world, it's common - which is what that Billionaire knew thanks to courses in Philosophy, and exploited to earn his stash 'o cash.

Incidentally Buddhists think that any proof of individuality is false or tainted, too. Best lump them in there too. (Descartes had to please the church, we can't know his private opinion, just his published works with necessary nods to the church.)

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