Star Wars and Philosophy (Popular Culture and Philosophy Series) - Kevin Decker [70]
Hume then asks, “What observations do we have of necessary connections between events?” None. According to Hume, we have no knowledge of causes and effects because we have no knowledge of the most important ingredient: the necessary connection between them.
What we observe when we see, for example, a moving cue-ball approaching a stationary billiard ball, is the motion of the cue-ball, followed by contact between the balls, and then the motion in the second ball. But no matter how closely or frequently we examine these events, we’ll never observe the necessary connection between them. We never observe that feature of their interaction that makes it so that the second ball must move when contacted by the moving cue-ball—it’s entirely possible that the second ball won’t move at all after the collision.
The lack of knowledge of any necessary connections means that, no matter how many times we observe the same thing, we can still imagine the second ball not moving after the collision. As Hume puts it, “From the mere repetition of any past impression, even to infinity, there will never arise any new original idea, such as that of a necessary connexion.”98 All we observe is that one kind of event is constantly followed by another kind of event; and so we develop a habit of expecting some kinds of events from the observation of others. Yet there’s no absurdity or impossibility in the typical effect not occurring when the familiar cause does. (Quantum physics tell us that the same causal conditions can have different effects at different times.)
Since, according to Hume, we never observe the necessary connection between cause and effect, we have no knowledge of causation, just a habit of expecting certain kinds of events to be followed by other kinds of events. Causation is thus a mysterious concept. After all, how does the mass of the earth cause the moon to stay in orbit, or cause earthly objects to fall? How does a magnet attract iron to it? Describing the causal mechanism in these kinds of interactions as a force fails to explain how that force does what it does. And in these cases, not only is the necessary connection unobserved, but contact between the objects appears to be missing too!
No matter how many times we see Jedi toppling legions of battle droids with the flick of their hands, we’ll never observe the necessary connection between the motion in the Jedi’s hands and the toppling of the battle droids. We’ll only observe that the one kind of event is followed by the other. But this doesn’t show us that they are necessarily connected. After all, experience tells us that hand-flicking and the toppling of objects at a distance is not typical!
The Force in Star Wars violates our expectations because it too operates in ways quite mysterious to us. It’s by the use of the Force that Luke draws his out-of-reach lightsaber to his hand in the wampa’s ice cave on Hoth. This kind of attractive force is just as mystifying to us as some of the causation we regularly experience, like gravity. So why can’t we lift a spacecraft from a swamp with our minds alone? What prevents that in our universe?
The Power that Keeps On Giving
We learned from Hume that no observation can amount to observation of a true cause. All we have is the habit of expecting things to behave in