True enough.
The problem with philosophical pronouncements by those unversed in the neurobiological realities of human experience is, however, that they are prone to rationalism and posit that empiricism is even possible, never mind superior to the former ¹ when nothing could be further from the truth.
In truth, Descartes was right …it’s all a figment of my imagination.
Philosophers do/will/have argue/ed the toss about the hardcore solipsism arising from Cartesian Dualism.
Wannabes ... who know no more than they have learned from tutorials/lectures/Wikipedia ... will argue that he later refuted it himself — as though the Inquisition’s offer to let him recant rather than simply burn at the stake for heresy without a chance to first publicly announce the error of his ways played no part in that ².
Either way around, however ... quite apart from the fact that, philosophically, until another position is proffered that is more logically unassailable, I have no choice but to be a solipsist ... as a psychologist, I know that, if Descartes was wrong and it is all externally real ... really real, so to speak ... then, by the time I become consciously aware of anything, it has been so mediated by my brain that I’ll never know to what extent my neurocognitive model tallies with the external stimulus — and Descartes was, therefore, right even though he was wrong.
Furthermore, I have in my life experienced things that I knew not to be real even as I experienced them. I still really experienced them, however.
Additionally, examine the phenomenon of phantom limb pain.
The neurons that control your ring-finger, for instance, overlap with those controlling the adjacent fingers. Should you lose your ring-finger, for some reason, those neurons do not simply down tools, as it were, but find something to do with their time, taking on duties related to the activities of the adjacent fingers instead. As a result, something affecting one (or both) of those fingers can cause the neurons that used to control your now missing ring-finger to respond and, as a result, trigger other neurons that (grossly speaking) ‘remember’ your ring-finger and cause you to experience ‘feeling’ it all over again.
Moreover, they needn’t even be responding to an external stimulus: neurons don’t simply fire or not fire but emit spikes of activity and it is when sufficient spikes, of sufficient strength, over a specific time frame are emitted that neurotransmission takes place — thus a number of the former ‘ring-finger neurons’ could simply respond to a peak in activity that was not the result of an external stimulus but of an amalgamation of spikes that resulted in the release of neurotransmitters into the synaptic cleft, resulting in their own activity.
Equally, investigate the phenomenon of Blindsight (C.f. Weiskrantz’s work for example), whereby visually sighted, but cortically blind, individuals never become consciously aware of stimuli to which they, nevertheless, respond in the real world … they simply (re)model their perceived reality to (re)write the history of their actions, denying that they saw anything … denying that they avoided obstacles on their path … insisting that they walked in a straight line even as external observers watched them circumnavigate large obstacles on their way from A to B … because they really didn’t (never consciously experienced doing so) … that’s what the external observers experienced, not them.
Thus the principle that “ideas could only ever be derived from our impressions, and thus they weren’t ever independent at all” is founded upon inadequate knowledge of how the nervous system, brain and mind function because, clearly, the idea of your ring-finger arose independently of the external stimulus triggering neurons that now don’t have a ring-finger to control and, equally clearly, the blindsighted have a different mental model of the world around them and a different history of their own actions than what is actually out there and what really happened, never consciously experiencing their own response, let alone becoming aware of the stimuli that resulted in those responses.
So ...
Given that my experience of something is itself real ... that what I experience is as real as ‘real’ is ever going to be for me ... that I’ll never know any different ... Epistemology and Ontology are bunk and the only field of Philosophy that is not the playground of the intellectually and morally destitute is the field of Moral Philosophy ³.
So, frankly, I’ve no time for the navel-gazing pseuds of the academe world who call themselves ‘philosophers’ ... because, whether I’m real or a figment of your imagination is irrelevant if the punch in the mouth felt real and really hurt, isn’t it?
[For all their being trapped on the cusp between pre-operational and concrete operational stages of development ... and, hence, unable to recognise that neither are they the centre of the Universe nor must everything have a physical reality ... even the mental midgets in the realm of Physics who favour the so called ‘observer effect’ of Quantum Mechanics grasp the fundamental truth that we create reality for ourselves].
So, really, even Moral Philosophy is just mental masturbation too ... because philosophising about it all doesn’t make any concrete difference to the World or its inhabitants — not even for the worse.
Hume’s scepticism is a valuable contribution but don’t be fooled by the misguided attribution of consequence to his thinking by rationalists who believe it to be consequential by virtue of its empiricism — after all, as such individuals are not equipped to realise that they even are rationalists ¹, their subsequent reasoning is unlikely to be more than accidentally coincident with Reality.
Sartre was right ⁴ ... what matters is how we act — sitting around contemplating how many a̶n̶g̶e̶l̶s̶ of the underprivileged can dance o̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶h̶e̶a̶d̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶a̶ ̶p̶i̶n̶ in a squalid, taxpayer funded bedsit owned by a socipathic, non-dom, fat cat rentier is for wankers.
Be rational … be sceptical — about that much at least, Hume was right.
Don’t try and delude yourself you have any empirical justification for anything you think or do though: Descartes was right … you don’t — Hume’s empiricism is bunk.
Apart from that though, yes, the observation is astute: we do indeed “fall into habits of thought that are reinforced into us because they anticipate a probabilistic connection” — that’s how the brain … and inevitably, therefore, mind … works.
—
¹ Oh, the irony.
² They crammed ‘Descartes For Dummies’ but didn’t bother to study the man himself.
³ What we’re gonna do about it.
⁴ Inevitably so — it’s the only logical step after the realisation that both Descartes and neuroscience/neuropsychology dictate that you will never know that it isn’t all real.
