What am I doing, exactly?
Seeing which machine learning techniques and packages in the R language provide the best classification rates for astronomical objects. What else would I be doing?
Hume stated in his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, “In vain…should we pretend to determine any single event, or infer any cause or effect, without the assistance of observation and experience.” It is precisely in this psychological claim that Hume developed a lens to view the relationships governing necessary connection and cause and effect among objects in the external world. Metaphysically, Hume may recognize the objective existence of material objects, but when it comes to the relationships controlling these objects and the role that the natural world plays in governing such relationships, Hume creates a framework in which these relationships are not explained by our direct knowledge of objective, natural laws and their influence on the objects, but rather through something that is completely inside of our heads. Through an analysis of Hume’s characterization of how the human mind perceives and interprets causal events and connections occurring among objects in the external world independent of our senses, I will demonstrate that the causal laws governing Humean metaphysics are completely dependent upon, and can only be explained by, Hume’s psychological claims.
Memory, according to Locke, is an act of the mind in which the agent, either by willing of the mind or by “turbulent and tempestuous passions”, revives a previously imprinted perception or idea with the knowledge that the perception or idea has been imprinted before. Although Locke made some very accurate claims about the mechanics of memory that have a basis in modern cognitive neuroscience, his theory is incomplete - it fails to address and develop a systematic and plausible explanation for the storage of impressions and consequent recollections of perceptions. In this essay, I will aim to develop a thorough interpretation of Locke’s theory of memory and consequently critique and offer a solution to the ambiguities mentioned previously, which will be grounded in a more modern understanding of memory.