Comparing Hume On Materialism And The Natural World

Life is ordinary, we all ‘choose’ what we want for breakfast, ‘choose’ what we wear to class, and ‘chose’ how long we procrastinated on our papers. It is really hard to understand, however I believe it is crucial to ask if we really do in fact choose these items. David Hume, a modern philosopher, provides us with a lens to better understand this notion of choice. He separates this concept into two different sections, the first, liberty, and the second, necessity. These two notions are a part of different states if the world; materialism, and the natural world. The material world is where we find necessity, and from there we are able to understand the basics of what could happen next. If I was given the option between vanilla and tapioca pudding, chances are I would choose vanilla, however that isn’t due to free will, it is most likely a representation of the options I was given.

I grabbed another cup of pudding vanilla the last time I had it, however tapioca balls have never failed to make me anything less than disgusted. And this feedback is how most of the world operates, we are provided the illusion of decisions from the options we are given, but that doesn’t mean we made the decision, we simply just had poor options. Hume argues that there is uniformity in the world, but this uniformity doesn’t necessarily mean anything deeper than that, it’s just that life provides us options, and from there, we have to choose something. There is also the natural world, in this world we see substantially less visible regularity, but that doesn’t mean it still isn’t there. The natural world is where we begin to understand human nature; human nature has trends. It is very simple to confuse liberty and necessity, free will is an