Christian De Quincy said in “The Paradox of Consciousness” that “We don’t know what matter is anymore than we know what mind is.” Indeed, there are many question marks in life. One big question that has plagued philosophers and scientists alike is the view of the self. Be it through experiences, interactions and realizations, we are all seemingly caught in the process of self-discovery and understanding. Some people simply take the self for granted. What is this “self” that we define ourselves to be? Is it merely our identity, or is it something more complex and profound? Philosopher David Hume holds the view that there is no self, and that what exists are merely experiences made up of “Impressions” and “Ideas”. While it is true that our experiences make up a large proportion of our lives, it is sweeping to deduce that there is no self simply because there is no constant evidence of it. …show more content…
According to Hume, “none of these perceptions resemble a unified and permanent self-identity that exists over time” , thus no reason to believe that the self exist. Indeed, as we grow and age, we experience many different things that shapes and alters our lives, but that does not take away our identity. Rather, it is the combination of all these perceptions, which differs for different individuals, that makes each of us unique and truly us. Furthermore, these perceptions are, after all, that of an individual’s own. Does that not then contribute to the formation of an identity? British philosopher and physician John Locke raised the issue that it is “impossible for any one to perceive without perceiving that he does perceive ”. There must be an active mind, or a consciousness, that is constantly processing and making sense of the various perceptions. If there is no self as Hume claims, the perceptions would not have meant anything because there is nothing to make sense of those
Self could be defined in different ways. In John Perry’s “dialogue on personal identity and immorality”, both characters Weirob and Cohen are correct on their argument of personal identity, there are just some imperfections on each of the views. My view of “persons are identical with brains” fills the gaps of ideas of them. Brain is the junction that could bring mind and
Derek Parfit, one of the most important defender of Hume, addresses the puzzle of the non-identity problem. Parfit claims that there is no self. This statement argues against the Ego Theory, which claims that beneath experience, a subject or self exists. Ego Theorists claims that the unity of a person’s whole life including life experiences is also known as the Cartesian view, which claims that each person is a “persisting purely mental thing.” Parfit uses the Split-Brain Case, which tells us something interesting about personal identity, to invalidate the Ego Theory. During the Split Brain procedure, there are neither ‘persons’ nor ‘persons’ before the brain was split. Within the experiment, the patient has control of their arms, and sees what is in half of their visual fields with only one of their hemispheres. However, when the right and left hemisphere disconnect, the patient is able to receive two different written questions targeted to the two halves of their visual field; thus, per hand, they write two different answers. In a split brain case, there are two streams of consciousness and Parfit claims that the number of persons involved is none. The scenario involves the disconnection of hemispheres in the brain. The patient is then placed in front of a screen where the left half of a screen is red and the right half is blue. When the color is shown to one hemisphere and the patient is asked, “How many colors do you see,” the patient, with both hands, will write only one color. But when colors are shown to both sides of the hemisphere, the patient with one hand writes red and the other writes blue.
The self represents the coherent whole resulting from the union of an individual's consciousness and unconsciousness. It is formed through a process referred to as 'individuation', within which the diverse aspects of personality are merged. Jung often depicted the self as a square, mandala, or circle.
Hume was the first thinker to point out the implications of the "representative theory of perception." He had inherited this theory from both his rationalist and empiricist predecessors. According to this view, when one says that he/she perceives something such as an apple, what it actually means is that the one has in the mind a mental idea or image or impression. Such a datum is an internal, mental, subjective representation of something that I assume to be an external, physical, fact. But there are, at least, two difficulties inherent in ascribing any truth to such perceptions. If truth is understood as the adequacy between the image and the object, then it is impossible to infer that there is a true world of objects since the only evidence. From this fundamental point, human reason loses its contingency in moral issues and decision making, letting feelings come to the first place. Hume emphasises the utility of knowledge as opposed to its correctness and suggests that morality begins with feeling rather than thought. In this case, Hume also believes that sympathy plays an essential role in morality. Sympathy is a fundamental feature of the human nature, that motivates us to make decisions. Sympathy can be described as an attempt to find or see one’s own nature in another object. Hume states that it is the start for all other human feelings.
Anil Ananthaswamy describes the self as the role the brain plays in our notions of self and existence. That our sense of self is layered, pulling information from
Locke first outlined his view of personal identity in Chapter XXVII of book II in ‘An Essay concerning Human Understanding’ however faced a number of criticisms. This essay will assess how convincing John Locke’s account of personal identity is, whilst analyzing Reid and Berkeley’s criticisms of his view. Locke’s psychological account of personal identity is not a persuasive one due to the inconsistencies that are highlighted by Reid and Berkeley and I will defend this view in this essay. Locke’s account of personal identity leads to a number of contradictions which he attempts to respond to, however whilst barely addressing the criticisms he faces, his responses are also unsuccessful as both Reid and Berkeley counter each response further.
The next major theory on how one obtains knowledge comes from David Hume’s Empiricism. Empiricism itself is the idea that all knowledge obtained is done so through senses or experiences throughout life. This theory itself clearly contrasts with rationalism as rationalists believe at no point that they should gain knowledge through senses/experiences. Furthermore, as an empiricist, he does not value anything that is not attained through experience. One of Hume’s beliefs is the idea that everyone is born with a mental “blank slate”. Because all knowledge we gain is thought to be gained through experience (which a newborn would have none at that point) the “slate” starts as blank and will filled in as the person learns through experiences. This
Again, through consciousness we can correlate our experiences and our actions. Each moment we experience becomes a memory. The particular way the our memories are distinguished from another persons account of the event is how our “self” intercepts it. One can also relate our “self” is the memories to our same “self” in the present. As Locke also examined in his writing Of Identity and Diversity, we can repeat the ideas of our past actions with the same consciousness that we do our present actions and our future actions. This demonstrated the ability of how our “self” can endure all of the many beautiful and excruciating happenings in
Locke believed that the identity of a person has the sameness of the consciousness: “What makes a man be himself to himself is sameness of consciousness, so personal identity depends entirely on that—whether the consciousness is tied to one substance throughout or rather is continued in a series of different su...
Hume believes that there is no concept of self. That each moment we are a new being since nothing is constant from one moment to the next. There is no continuous “I” that is unchanging from one moment to the next. That self is a bundle of perceptions and emotions there is nothing that forms a self-impression which is essential to have an idea of one self. The mind is made up of a processions of perceptions.
Hume is the creator of two different perceptions that reside in the human mind, ideas and impressions. Impressions are more simply put as the root of all ideas, according to Hume. “… all our more lively perceptions, when we hear, or see, or feel, or love, or hate, or desire, or will.”(Cahn) We create our own ideas off of impressions that Hume says are, “…less forcible and lively…” (Cahn) Ideas must come after an impression because “what never was seen or heard of may yet be conceived.” (Cahn) So, Hume’s claim is that not all of our ideas are like impressions, but, that every idea depends on an impression. We can have an idea if and only if we first had the impression that the idea is perceived from. Not all ideas and impressions come to our minds directly from the senses, but are composed of much smaller particles in the mind that are like copies of what has come through sensory experience.
Referencing back through Who Are You: Consciousness, Identity, and the Self, the English philosopher and physician John Locke ideas about self state what does it mean to be a person and what is consciousness? He felt a person is a thinking, intelligent being who has the ability to reason and to reflect. He also thought consciousness is being aware that we are thinking (Chaffee, 2013). Personally, he was one of the few philosophers that I could agree with in this chapter. The world is full of human beings, with the ability to think, to go about their day and perform the tasks needed to survive, but with one of the questions that arose fairly early in the class, how many people contemplate their existence? How many have the ability to reason and reflect and actually do so? I feel Locke was on the right track in his thinking – we have the ability, but each one of us has failed to ask the right questions and look for deeper answers throughout our life. I have gone through periods in my life where surviving was all I could manage and I look back on those times with regret because, as I si...
Hume proposes that the notion of the self has no empirical foundation. He postulates that all ideas are a result of a prior impression. Following this he posits that since the idea of self relies on an impression, this impression must in some way endure throughout a persons whole life, since an idea of self is...
...have struggled with the nature of human beings, especially with the concept of “self”. What Plato called “soul, Descartes named the “mind”, while Hume used the term “self”. This self, often visible during hardships, is what one can be certain of, whose existence is undoubtable. Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am” concept of transcendental self with just the conscious mind is too simplistic to capture the whole of one’s self. Similarly, the empirical self’s idea of brain in charge of one’s self also shows a narrow perspective. Hume’s bundle theory seeks to provide the distinction by claiming that a self is merely a habitual way of discussing certain perceptions. Although the idea of self is well established, philosophical insight still sees that there is no clear presentation of essential self and thus fails to prove that the true, essential self really exists.
According to Hume, though we continuously perceive, the perception always changes slightly, so the slightly changing perception is different from the past one. Therefore, it is meaningless to try to find constant self-identity from the changing perception, or impression. For Hume, there is no connection between present impression and past impression, so unchangeable “self-identity” is a fiction. Instead, he said that we “feel” that the impressions seem to constitute self-identity. Moreover, while some say a spatiotemporal continuity and resemblance are a criterion of identity, Hume says those concepts don’t guarantee identity. In “On “There Is No Self”” by Hume, he states “We have a distinct idea of an object, that remains invariable and uninterrupted thro’ a supposed variation of time; and this idea we call that of identity or sameness….But supposing some very small or inconsiderable part to be added to the mass[he took “a mass” for an example], tho’ this absolutely destroys the identity of the whole[the mass],” In other words, if an idea of identity is a distinct idea of an object which remains the same, then the object has no longer the same identity if a tiny thing is added to the object. In human-identity case, he states “I never can catch myself at any time without a perception,” which implies that a perception or an impression is a