quick thoughts on Hume

Here is one way of thinking about Hume's theory of perception: imagine a shaped stamp is pressed onto a circle of wet ink. Depending on how hard the stamp was pressed, the stamp should leave a rough outline of its shape on the ink. 

For Hume, we can think of the stamp's pressing onto the ink as the way we get impressions. We receive an impression when the senses come in contact with something in the external world, and the impressions lasts only as long as they interact with the object. From these impressions, we gain ideas, which are simply copies of the impression. Ideas are distinct from impressions only with respect to vivacity: with the latter, there is a much higher intensity of experience than the experience of ideas. A simple example of this is the difference between stubbing your toe and recalling the experience of stubbing your toe at a later time. The former experience is a much more intense experience than the latter, even though the latter can still produce intense feelings. 

There are two interesting implications that follow from this theory. First, notice that reason is absent. To me, this is counter-intuitive. When I think of the way I perceive the things around me, I tend to think that reason at least has some role. Not for Hume! And second, the upshot of this view is that we only get ideas of things from impressions. This is also counter-intuitive to me. It seems like we can think of immaterial things in a way completely detached from impressions. Further, it seems like we can think of things we've never encountered before, like a thousand-sided die. Hume might reply to this and say that when we think of this gargantuan die, we are really just combining together simpler ideas we gained from impressions into a giant die. This might be right!