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“We have no experience of a simple, individual impression that we can call the self —
where the ‘self’ is the totality of a person’s conscious life.”
“For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on
some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or
pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe
anything but the perception.” – (Treatise, 1.4.6.3)
But no matter how closely we examine our own experiences, we never observe anything
beyond a series of transient feelings, sensations, and impressions.
The self is a “bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with
an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.”
Humans so desperately want to believe that they have a unified and continuous self or soul
that they use their imaginations to construct a fictional self. But this fictional self is not
real; what we call the self is an imaginary creature, derived from a succession of
impermanent states and events.
“In searching for the self, one cannot simultaneously be the hunter and the hunted.”
The self is a dynamic entity/activity, continually synthesizing sensations and ideas into an
integrated, meaningful whole.
We all have an inner and an outer self which together form our consciousness.
The inner self is comprised of our psychological state and our rational intellect.
The outer self includes our sense and the physical world.
The self, in the form of consciousness, utilizes conceptual categories (or “transcendental
rules”) such as substance, cause and effect, unity, plurality, possibility, necessity, and
reality to construct an orderly and “objective” world that is stable and can be investigated
scientifically.
The ‘self’ constructs its own reality, actively creating a world that is familiar, predictable,
and, most significantly, mine.
“One who makes himself a worm cannot complain later if people step on him.”
The essence of the self is its conscious awareness of itself as a thinking, reasoning,
reflecting identity.
The physical body is an important part of what makes up the subjective self.
Physical Appetite – our basic biological needs such as hunger, thirst, and sexual desire.
Spirit or Passion – our basic emotions such as love, anger, ambition, aggressiveness,
empathy.
You are a “thinking thing,” a dynamic identity that engages in all of those mental
operations we associate with being a human self.
References:
https://www.iep.utm.edu/hume/
https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/hume/themes/
https://www.pearsonhighered.com/assets/samplechapter/0/1/3/0/013048069X.pdf
https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2013/07/22/brain-chemistry-and-the-self