David Hume thought our ideas come from impressions — from what we gather through our senses. So where could the idea of a “self” come from? I can see and touch my thumb, but I can’t get my eyes or hands on the “self.”
Pain and pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensations succeed each other and never all exist at the same time. It cannot, therefore, be from any of these impressions, or from any other, that the idea of the self is derived: and consequently there is no such idea.
In Hume’s view, we are “bundles or collections of perceptions.”
I have a wonderful sense of myself when I’m celebrating what a jolly good fellow I am, i.e. when I’m not thinking about it. When I examine the idea, it evaporates.
This collection of notes is a good example of the problem. When we talk about a self or soul or mind, we’re talking about a collection of interests.
In my case, a lot of the impressions that have stuck in my memory involve the ancient Greeks, the natural history of Zarzamora Creek, Wittgenstein, Montaigne, writing, short stories, essays, Texas and the peoples of the ancient Southwest. It would be a long list — “tedious” might be the better modifier. But there’s no essence in there, nothing that’s essentially me.
Hume’s Theory of Personal Identity comes from A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part IV.
Here’s Wittgenstein on the same topic:
The thinking, presenting subject; there is no such thing.
If I wrote a book, “The world as i found it,” I should also therein have to report on my body and say which members obey my will and which do no, etc. This then would be a method of isolating the subject or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject; that is to say, of it alone in this book mention could not be made.
That’s 5.631 in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. It's surely one of the strangest passages to come from a book on logic.
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