David Hume

In this course

Hume's problem of induction—the philosophical challenge that past experience cannot logically guarantee future outcomes—becomes crucial for Negarestani's critique of AI superintelligence models that rely on purely inductive reasoning as their basis for prediction and decision-making. By invoking Hume's skepticism about induction's logical foundations, the course readings use this eighteenth-century epistemological problem to challenge contemporary AI researchers like Bostrom and Yudkowsky who assume machines can achieve rational omniscience through Bayesian prediction alone. This framing positions Hume as a historical anchor for questioning whether intelligence can ever be reduced to statistical pattern-matching or whether it requires the social and semantic dimensions that Negarestani argues are necessarily foundational.

Background

David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist and essayist who is known for his highly influential system of empiricism, philosophical scepticism and metaphysical naturalism. Beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), Hume strove to create a naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. Following John Locke, Hume rejected the existence of innate ideas, holding that all our ideas derive ultimately from impressions, but in his fork he distinguished relations of ideas, known a priori, from matters of fact, whose knowledge rests on experience. This places him in the empiricist tradition of Locke and George Berkeley, while drawing his experimental method from Francis Bacon.

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