I love David Hume for multiple reasons: he was a genius, he was perfectly round (not that I promote obesity and its enormously deleterious effects on our health care system, but it kind of worked for a short, 18th century, ultra-sociable philosopher), he loved backgammon and beer, and he quit philosophy because he was "too old and too rich." The thing I love most about him, however, is his understanding of cause and effect. Essentially his thought was cause and effect did not exist (anyone that is a Hume scholar will shit their pants and throw their computer across the room at my bastardization of one of the greatest Scottish minds - a mind only one step behind that of Mark Harris. To them I say 'shut the hell up, it's my blog.'). Cause and effect is a temporal ordering of a timeless set of events. It is us manufacturing order and meaning. We create the "necessary connection."
Consider a billiard ball hitting another. The second bounces of a in predictable, linear manner. My daughter has never seen a game of pool. To her, the white ball hitting the black ball and the black bouncing off is an isolated event. The single case yields no connection. It is simply an event. It is over time, seeing numerous balls hitting other balls (yes I chuckled a little) that one develops a connection. In other words, we create the connection and then define it. Potential energy becomes kinetic energy following the repulsion of electromagnetic forces inherent in the balls (I laughed again).
What are these other than words to define the unknown? What is energy? Force? Power? What is honor? Freedom? Justice? What is love? These are varying definitions of the space between cause and effect. They are our way of placing order on the world, a world that without our order driven consciousness would simply exist. Not change, not progress, just simply exist.
We live in that space between cause and effect. And it is that space that we as a medical field need to look to truly treat our patients. Smoking causes cancer causes death. My patient doesn't derive meaning from smoking, cancer, death. S/he derives it in between. As a physician I create a cause (surgical excision) to alter what I suspect would otherwise be the effect (cancer elimination instead of growth). I define that space between smoking, cancer, death through science. But my patient may define it through art, religion, social bonds, etc. The point is, it's the same space no matter how we define it. We can't forget that the meaning is arbitrary and subjective whether by scientific experiment or spiritual intuition.
