Barbara Jung - Duration of objects and relations between objects in Hume´s Treatise, and self-similarity

Simple impressions, the starting points for Hume´s theory of association, are, roughly, values of functional concepts like black, white, round or angular. In his famous comparison of a globe of white marble and a cube of black marble (Treatise of Human Nature 1.1.7.18) Hume arrives at the conclusion that we can find “two separate resemblances”, in this case concerning colour and figure. These qualities, he states, are "distinctions of reason".
   What is immediately given to the senses are obviously particular objects. In the Treatise, Hume used the notions of ‘object’ and ‘impression’ interchangeably and quite carelessly (as often criticized). He didn´t pose the question how, or if at all, the unity of objects is actively constituted by a bundle of perceived qualities. He concentrated his attention to the problem how the belief in an object´s identity through time can be explained, and made it the focal point of his attack against the traditional concept of substance. He stated that the idea of an enduring object is due to perfect resemblance of perceptions at two instants of time (constancy), or to spatio-temporal contiguity, or to causal inference (coherence). Despite the fact that perceptions might have been interrupted, we may believe in one identical object. According to Hume, this belief is a fiction just as the concept of substance is: he reduced it to a notion equivalent with “bundle” or “unity”. Objects which “are suppos´d to continue the same...” he put it, “... consist of a succession of parts, connected together by resemblance, contiguity, or causation.” (T 1.4.6.7) In other chapters of the Treatise, Hume investigates the belief in a relation between one present object and another one, not presently perceived. Interestingly he explains the belief in a relation between different objects in exactly the same way as the fictitious identity of one object: it can, and should, be derived from resemblance, contiguity, or causation.
   As the self-criticism in Hume´s Conclusion of book 1 shows, he was aware that causal relations are reasoned from objects which are tacitly presupposed to last identically through time. In the light of his claim to find rules “to reason justly and regularly” (T 1.4.7.4), he called it a contradiction to proceed any further from a mere illusion. These doubts did not not so much affect psychological explanation but justification of belief. Hume apparently was not willing to abandon a metaphysical aspect of the idea of substance he threw overboard.
   I want to leave this problem, albeit its importance for the understanding of Hume´s sceptical approach, aside and want to concentrate on the self-similar feature which his explanation exhibits. Frames in Barsalou´s sense can be helpful to find a representation for this structure. But Hume´s proceeding is not only recursive by repeating a tree-like analysis of each of the elements again and again, but also in a narrow sense, by iterating the very same “branches” of the tree. So, I would like to show more detailed, it can be interpreted as structured like a loop control system as well.