ABSTRACT
Hume’s chief intuition regarding the problem of personal identity was that one cannot explain the self as a collection of states of consciousness, because the idea of a collection of different things immediately contradicts the idea of a single thing. Once one has defined the self as a collection, the idea that that collection also possesses an essential unity can always be questioned by some sort of skeptical argument. In fact, Hume was not entirely consistent in advancing this critique of personal identity, since he began by saying that he could look into himself when surveying his states of consciousness in search of a self. Thus, he inadvertently acknowledged a unity of sorts to his own states of consciousness in the very process of trying to deny there could be one. However, this was not a serious flaw in his argument, because he could equally have said that he was surveying “states of consciousness” (without any indication of ownership), and that there was no self anywhere to be found. This latter way of putting his initial move has the advantage of bringing out more clearly how the problem of finding a unity to states of consciousness is the same as the problem of individuation. If one could survey states of consciousness potentially belonging to anyone, or if states of consciousness were not immediately “own” states, then one would have the problem of knowing where one person ended and another began, or where the boundaries were between people. Thus, finding a unity to one’s own or
anyone else’s states of consciousness would involve the same task as trying to individuate one person from another.
