Self

Self
   1) The Self (Personal Identity) Is But a Bundle or Collection of Perceptions
   There are some philosophers who imagine we are every moment intimately conscious of what we call our SELF; that we feel its existence and its continuance in existence; and are certain, beyond the evidence of a demonstration, both of its perfect identity and simplicity. . . .
   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. . . .
   [S]etting aside some metaphysicians . . . I may venture to affirm, of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement. Our eyes cannot turn in their sockets without varying our perceptions. Our thought is still more variable than our sight; and all our other senses and faculties contribute to this change; nor is there any single power of the soul, which remains unalterably the same, perhaps for one moment. The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance, pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. There is properly no simplicity in it at any one time, nor identity in different, whatever natural propensity we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity. The comparison of the theatre must not mislead us. [It is merely] the successive perceptions . . . that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of the place where the scenes are represented, or of the materials of which it is composed. (Hume, 1978, pp. 251-256)
   2) To Find Wherein Personal Identity Consists
   To find wherein personal identity consists, we must consider what person stands for; which, I think, is a thinking intelligent being that has reason and reflection and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places; which it does only by that consciousness which is inseparable from thinking and, as it seems to me, essential for it-it being impossible for anyone to perceive without perceiving that he does perceive.
   When we see, hear, smell, taste, feel, meditate, or will anything, we know that we do so. Thus it is always as to our present sensations and perceptions; and by this everyone is to himself that which he calls self, not being considered in this case whether the same self be continued in the same or different substances. For since consciousness always accompanies thinking, and it is that which makes everyone to be what he calls self, and thereby distinguishes himself from all other thinking things, in this alone consists personal identity, i.e., the sameness of a rational being. And as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person. It is the same self now it was then, and it is by the same self as this present one that now reflects on it, that action was done. (Locke, 1975, Bk. II, Chap. 27, Sec. 9-10)

Historical dictionary of quotations in cognitive science. . 2015.

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