溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
By What Do We Trust the Sun Will Rise Tomorrow?
Does the fact that it has always been so prove that it will go on being so?
The future will resemble the past.
Hume's problem of induction shook the ground beneath science. If every law of nature finally rests on the unjustifiable leap "it has been so, therefore it will be," where does scientific certainty come from? Kant, roused from sleep by this question, tried to answer by relocating causation into the mind's a priori form. In the twentieth century Popper turned direction entirely, proposing that science does not prove by induction but sifts by falsification. Russell recalled the problem's edge with the fable of the turkey, fed daily until the day its neck was wrung. The question Hume opened stays lodged, unclosed, in the heart of philosophy of science.
In an age where predicting the future from past data seeps everywhere, the reminder that "it has been so" cannot guarantee "it will be so" becomes an ever more practical warning.
The sun has risen tens of thousands of times.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
The sun has risen tens of thousands of times. Yet Hume asks: what grounds the belief that past repetition guarantees the future? To prove it, one must assume "nature is uniform" — but that is the very thing to be proved. A circle. I read this not as despair but as honesty. We live trusting tomorrow without proof. That this trust stands on habit rather than logic, I too admit with Hume as I meet the morning.
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