"No object ever discovers, by the qualities which appear to the senses, either the causes which produced it, or the effects which will arise from it . . ."
(end of 6th paragraph of section IV)
Hume argues in this section that even if we have sensory knowledge, we will never determine causes or predict effects unless we also have experience. I wonder if this is true. First of all, we could take the extreme example of an omnipotence (ie God); I've heard it said many times that if we could know absolutely everything about the universe at the present moment, we would also know its past and future, because that past and future are necessary to the universe's current configuration. This makes sense to me. If everything has a cause and effect and nothing is created or destroyed (the universe is just a set of constant particles bouncing off each other), then couldn't I tell from their current position what their next position will be? Couldn't we use reason to understand space and motion, sort of like in Lucretius did?
But even if we don't take this extreme example, there still might be problems. I wonder how Hume would react to modern chemistry. He claims that no one could predict water turning to ice, but couldn't we predict this merely by examining the molecular structure of water? Or if we didn't have knowledge of the effect, couldn't we get pretty close, come up with a pretty good hypothesis with a reasonable percentage of certainty?
Basically, could Hume's problem not be "merely sense" but "merely limited sense"?
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