There is no such thing as a self.

[The_Wizard]

Please read the article first, the following are only my lecture notes.

Reference: Hume, David, Treaties of Human Nature, (c) 1961, E. P. Dutton and Company, pp. 238-249










 

[savetherainforest]

As pathetic of a reply as it is, for the moment all I can muster is a feeble: Wow.  

[bluecherry]

Wall of text. D: Crap damn, I haven't read it all yet, (but I will! I'm doing so right now! Though I cringed a bit seeing how long that thing is, being long doesn't make me unwilling to read something and respond thoroughly as long as it isn't something which either I've heard before or has a fundamental flaw which makes reading any more unnecessary,) but when I saw the title of this thread my first thought was "What the heck have you been smoking?" Then I came in and saw it was about something by Hume and no longer was so surprised. razz By the way, are these notes written by you, or are they written by somebody else? The formatting of them, with word for word quotes for example, looks like somebody wrote it up ahead of time, as opposed to being personal notes written as a class is given, which would tend to be done with more short hand stuff, approximations of longer quotes and such. It also says "we" in some places, so unless you've got multiple personality disorder perhaps, I don't think you'd address yourself in the plural in your notes to self. If somebody else wrote them, do you have their permission to be reproducing them elsewhere in their entirety like this? If you don't, you should probably take it down. Though if you do take it down, posting what was the place it came from would be nice.

Alright, now down to business. To begin with the choice of wording used to define things is weaselly here. The choice of definition and identification to attack of "self" here is deliberately misleading, setting up a strawman to beat up and knock down. Maybe that is what Descartes's stuff he said about what the "self" would imply, but all that says is there's a problem with what Descartes said, not automatically that there can be no "self" as Descartes's definition is not the be-all, end-all definition for "self." Being able to be knocked unconscious means there is no self? Lame excuse. talk2hand Descartes seems to have said the self must have uninterrupted consciousness? Descartes was stupid then. (Side note: for a class I had freshman year of college I read the thing by Descartes where he comes up with the famous "cogito, ero sum" and he started off with a good idea, identifying an axiomatic truth to set up a solid foundation to build knowlege off of from there, but from there on he stopped following strictly enough his aims of building up knowledge a step at a time and started jumping to conclusions with insufficient cause. You can accept something Descartes said/proposed like the cogito thing, that doesn't mean you have to necessarily believe everything he ever said/proposed. There are some things where belief in one thing is inseparable from others, but the entirety of Descartes' philosophy is not inseparable.) What is needed is a better definition of "self."

This is the definition of "self" I'm going to suggest for this post: The “self” is not a “constant impression,” but an autonomous “faculty that perceives reality, forms judgments, chooses values.”quote It can have, and is the only thing that can have, direct experience of its own thoughts and feelings. The “self” is that which thinks as opposed to what one thinks. It needs to be present and able to function to be said to exist, as opposed to only being able to be said to exist as long as it is actually functioning. To add any more necessary clarifications, if you get knocked out, you aren’t presently functioning, but you are able to return to functioning again. If, however, you got irreparable brain damage and became a vegetable, the “there’s no coming back from this one” variety, then your “self” has ceased to exist. Your “character” or “personality” on the other hand is that which you think and do, and that can change over time for various reasons (not everything HAS to change all the time though. Although, one or both of those words may be used only to refer to the boiled down essentials, rather than everything you think and do. Might need to work on wording to distinguish better that which refers to the essentials and that which refers to everything . . . Figuratively the words may be used more loosely and interchangeably though, “self,” and “personality“/“character.” The word “you” for example can be pretty loose for when it is referring to “self” and/or “personality”/character” with the ability to refer to any/either or both/all depending on how the word is used. Semantics, there can be a lot of hair splitting in English as it stands. D; The language could use some work, but, that’s another issue for another time. )

Heh, the commentary between the part about "Hume's reply" up to (iii) gave me a bit of a chuckle. And that is largely a problem here with Hume, the part about where they mention "he's an empiricist." The problem with empiricists? Neglect or denial of concepts. In the reverse though, the problem with rationalists is being all concept and neglecting or denying percepts. Both are important, induction and deduction are both valid methods of obtaining knowledge and our understandings will never be complete without both and we'll be functioning at best on less than optimal capacity. Perceiving and conceiving (no, not as in reproduction) work together.

For identity, that's a concept, no shocker he wants to throw the notion out the window. What, for those of us not rejecting concepts right out of hand, would be a proper definition of concepts that would allow for keeping the identity of something in mind even if it undergoes some amount of change?
How would we distinguish the identity of something? The concept of identity is not dependent on all aspects always remaining the same for something to retain its identity. Only essential characteristics need to remain for the identity to be retained. How are essential characteristics determined? Find what it is that distinguishes that object as a whole and distinct from all other existents, those are the essentials that need to remain for the identity to stay the same (the rest, though part of the thing, can change without altering the identity.) For example, if I were to heat up a balloon and it expanded some (lets assume it doesn't expand so much it pops though,) that doesn't make it not a balloon anymore or a different balloon. However, if I were to heat up an ice cube and it melted, it would no longer be that ice cube as the defining characteristic of the molecular structure which made the water a solid object and generally cube shaped are gone. The water resulting from heating the ice cube may still be there, and it can be thought of as the remnants of that ice cube, but "ice cube" it is no more. Sounds to me like Hume is just defining things as "They can't change AT ALL and retain their identity!" just so he can try to say the "self" is non-existent. Maybe what he means when he says "self" is non-existent, but I think applying his definition to say what most of us think of when we use the term "self" would be equivocation.

"What keeps the bundles together?" "Doesn't resemblance presuppose identity?" (I'd add the question in about "Doesn't change assume identity in the first place?" It has to have been one thing to begin with in order to be able to change to something else.) This thing was a dang long issue to address for a post U:< However, it sounds like the place these notes are from isn't half bad at all. The thing is made easy to understand what is being said on a complex subject, gets to the points, and has sharp, insightful questions raised. The one thing I find a bit muddled though is what is being said on the section about cause and effect. Are they trying to say that example about looking at a person and then a place were causeless? If so, I'd respond that looking at the person was not the cause of looking at the place then, true, but the cause of both came before doing either when they did so to try to demonstrate their point that the one was not causing the other. Or is the argument instead cause and effect is not a perfect line with everything caused strictly by the thing directly preceding it? (like cause and effect was a single straight line of dominos knocking each other over.) If it is the latter position, I admit I'm not following anymore the relation of that to arguments about identity and the existence or non-existence of the "self" even given Hume's notion of us trying to get a sense of self through transitions being smooth enough we don't notice them. sweatdrop However, I have to chuckle at the part near the end about "Why be moral? I'd rather be happy" because I am following a specific moral code based on my following it being aimed toward providing me the best possible quality life I can get as the human being that I am. XP (And I don't mean I'm considering something being told to me to be moral "just because" means I'll do it and be so much prouder of myself for living up to that moral code than I would otherwise be that that means the moral code makes my life better, nor that I'm hedonistically just accepting whatever I find I already have somehow come to believe and just going with that.)

 

[CheKage]

Bluecherry is right! If there is no self, you didn't write this.
Anyway, I scrolled it down and read fast. I can ask you for now one thing: how much did discovering this last? Somebody asked you this, tough if you are right, it was not me!
Also, somebody can say that you can resume all of this through the title!  

[bluecherry]

Lol, thanks? xd Though by the way in case you missed it in skimming, this stuff wasn't the poster's idea, the poster was mentioning things about ideas by the philosopher Hume.

 

[zerothreeseven]

Descarte's "I Think, therefore I am"