Self

[Countess Anya of the North Parish]

What is your opinion of Hume's idea of self and personality? Do you agree with it or do you just follow and ditch it?

[Associate Justice PiT]

     I rather like it insofar as it ties into bundle theory's resistance to attempts to see something substantive in the existence of objects. It gels nicely with my tendency to view the universe & all things in it as something of a "lucky accident".

[Countess Anya of the North Parish]

    I rather like it insofar as it ties into bundle theory's resistance to attempts to see something substantive in the existence of objects. It gels nicely with my tendency to view the universe & all things in it as something of a "lucky accident".

do you think of yourself like that? cause no matter how much sense it makes i would like to think i am annie not someone who is constantly changes. plus if we are constantly changing i can never get mad at someone for effing up. which i do. That is just creepy. and i would like to think the if i messed up someone would let me off the hook for it even if it was a week ago. like i get the 70 year old in jail being different but hume gives a loop on the basis of any amount of time for change. so like 5sec, 5 hours or 5 years. it doesnt matter.

[Associate Justice PiT]

     I rather like it insofar as it ties into bundle theory's resistance to attempts to see something substantive in the existence of objects. It gels nicely with my tendency to view the universe & all things in it as something of a "lucky accident".

do you think of yourself like that? cause no matter how much sense it makes i would like to think i am annie not someone who is constantly changes. plus if we are constantly changing i can never get mad at someone for effing up. which i do. That is just creepy. and i would like to think the if i messed up someone would let me off the hook for it even if it was a week ago. like i get the 70 year old in jail being different but hume gives a loop on the basis of any amount of time for change. so like 5sec, 5 hours or 5 years. it doesnt matter.

     I would say that we do change constantly, but in a gradual manner as a reaction to our environment. In other words, we interact with facts, arguments, & ideas presented to us & change in response to them.

     Of course there are minor aspects of us that undergo capricious changes, in a manner almost like the Brownian motion of a microparticle. But the bigger, more important aspects of ourselves constantly undergo small changes & adjustments that only have noticeable effects on a large time scale.

[anvi]

The stuff that always gets cited regarding Hume's notion of the lack of a self is from the Treatise, which is his early major work.  There seem some good reasons to believe that by the time he was writing his later works on ethics, he was of the view that we slowly build our senses of identity out of sentiments, accreted tastes and complex networks of habits.  On the earlier view, there is just skepticism about a self, but on the later one, while the self is not some fixed, transcendental given datum of experience, it is a construction, an achievement that results from our accumulated experience.  I'm more inclined toward something like that later view than to the earlier one.