November 19, 2018 Monday
Bedtime Story
David Hume "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding"
One of the chapters in the 1748 book of David Hume “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding” bears the title “Of
Probability”.
Hume discusses in this chapter the subjects
of probability and chance where “probability” is described as a higher chance
of occurring of some specific event.
Higher chance is also with respect to human
psychology where an individual expects some event to occur with greater
frequency.
Hume describes “chance” again with respect
to human expectation and this chance includes all the possible events that a
particular human would expect to happen concerning a particular event that his
past experience has taught him.
But then Hume adds that later as more
experience accumulates in future the same individual would expect some outcomes
to occur more frequently than others.
Thus “chance” changes with knowledge and
experience of the world.
In short “chance” and thereby “probability”
is a way of learning from past experiences to predict the future.
The chapter of Hume that would have
directly concerned the religious Bayes was ‘Of Miracles” wherein Hume was being
critical of the value of human testimony.
This is what Hume said concerning
testimonies of apes and their reliabilities:
(a) Human testimonies are often conflicting
for the same event
(b) Humans can often be dishonest and even
liars for several reasons and ulterior motives
(c) Fewer witnesses are lesser reliable the
more witnesses
(d) Witnesses are often biased and may have
reason for lying (even to themselves)
(e) Testimony of any witness that is either
too hesitant or too sure of his account must be treated with skepticism
But the worse and most damning, as far as
the statistician and the minister Bayes was concerned, was the last reason for
not believing the account of witnesses.
(f) Any testimony given by any witness
narrating miracles strongly warrants doubts.
By miracles Hume simply meant any narration
that goes against the everyday experience of natural laws or any proposition that
flies on the face of common-day experience.
Hume gives four reasons why any story of
miracle should at the very onset be discarded unless some strong evidences are
forthcoming:
(a) In the entire human history there has
been no miracle that has been authenticated by a large body of neutral
observers or an unbiased jury.
(b) Human beings are inherently credulous
and take a fascination towards tales of miracles a weakness that is greatly
exploited by charlatans and godmen.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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