Hume on identity

In A Treatise of Human Nature, philosopher David Hume utilizes the concepts of impressions and ideas to describe the nature of our thoughts. He states that impressions are derived from perceptions (by which he is simply referring to our sense perception - visual, auditory, gustatory, olfactory, and somatosensory - experiences of hot or cold, light or shade, pain or pleasure, etc.), but attaches "force and violence" as the criterion by which our perceptions become impressions. In other words, impressions originate from our perceptions but formulated in accordance with what we direct our attention to and the degree of emotional impact.

He goes on to state that these impressions give rise to ideas, "faint images in thinking and reasoning." This is an assumption, on Hume's part, about the nature of ideas and concepts. The jury is still out on whether ideas are "faint images" or something else. And, if we follow Hume's model of cognition, we do not know precisely how impressions become ideas. This is the domain of neuroscience, cognitive science, and cognitive psychology. The last time I checked, almost ten years ago, Susan Carey's book on concepts and her proposal of bootstraping was, it seemed, at the forefront but I have not kept up to date with this research. But I digress, given the limitations of technology and cognitive science during Hume's era, let us give him the benefit of the doubt and entertain his model. By making the connection from perception to impression to idea, Hume raises a very important question with regard to the nature of formulating the idea of a self: what impression or impressions is the idea of the self derived from?

Hume states that the idea of the self is formulated by our faculty of imagination - thought processes in relation to the concern we take in regards to ourselves. When we turn our thoughts towards ourselves, we are always with a perception. We are always experiencing something from our perception. Moreover, we are never only with a single perception either. As I sit here, I can see what is on my computer screen, I can feel the chair that I am sitting on, I can hear the music that I am listening to, and smell the cigarette smoke on my clothes. Although my attention is focused on one particular perception - the computer screen - all perceptions are occurring at once. We can sense what is around our immediate environment, but we may not be entirely aware of what is outside the spotlight of our attention.

According to Hume, the very fact that I have just described several perceptions that co-occur indicates that each of those perceptions is distinct and distinguishable. He claims that this is the "essence" of each perception. Moreover, the succession of these perceptions, although distinct and variable, is unified by our faculty of imagination. This allows for a smooth transition of ideas in our thoughts. It is by this faculty of our imagination (via resemblance of perceptions, causation, and contiguity) that we connect our impressions and create a personal identity: an idea of the self. In this way, Hume posits that the mind is a kind of theater: "we 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."

If the idea of the self is a bundle of perceptions, linked together by our faculty of imagination, then it is necessarily a construct of incoming perceptions and the subsequent formation of impressions. There is no foundation or center for the idea of the self. No direct impression from which the idea of the self can be grounded. This would indicate that the idea is solely the creation of experience; our mental faculties have constructed a fictional self that give us coherency as a single object. That is, the emergence of the idea of the self is the product of our meaning-making capabilities and therefore a social construction motivated, and informed, by our own embodiment of ideas.