Tags / 12 quotes from 1 source
#bundle-theory
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
Hume never catches himself without a perception
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, colour or sound, etc. I never catch myself, distinct from some such perception. David…
Origins of the bundle theory
Psychological connectedness and continuity is not the result of any core pearl of self that carries the continuity. Rather, this is sometimes called a ‘bundle theory’. The eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume was the first to use ‘bundle’ in this context, just once. His…
The Ego Trick
you just are the collection of these thoughts, ‘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’.6 This is the heart of the Ego Trick. The trick is to create something…
The self is a function, not a substance
We only go wrong if we’re too impressed by this unity and assume that it means that underlying it is a single thing. But the self is not a substance or thing, it is a function of what a certain collection of stuff does.
Much of reality is bundle-like
it’s worth remembering just how much of reality is bundle-like. Atoms are not solid objects but bundles of electrons, neutrons and protons. A plant is a complicated system, not a simple thing. Cars only exist as an assemblage of parts. The internet is a network, not an object…
A singular self without a singular thing
The unity we experience, which allows us legitimately to talk of ‘I’, is a result of the Ego Trick – the remarkable way in which a complicated bundle of mental events, made possible by the brain, creates a singular self, without there being a singular thing underlying it. It…
Explaining versus explaining away
My inattentive acquaintance had failed to spot the difference between explaining something and explaining it away. The TV programme had done the latter: it had shown that what appears to be spontaneous human combustion is no such thing. There are those among both supporters and…
Illusory is only the idea of an unchanging self
the most coherent readings of its teachings on not-self are indeed remarkably congruent with more recent bundle theories. The self is not an illusion. What is illusory is an idea of self which sees it as an unchanging, immortal essence.
Wedding vows bind future selves
Agency – the individual’s capacity to act – can perhaps explain some of the unity of self over time that a standard bundle view makes problematic. Take a long-term commitment like marriage. On a simple bundle view, wedding vows make no sense: I cannot bind my future self if…
Agency unifies the self
agency is certainly something that is often missing from bundle accounts of the self. Just as there is no point in the brain where the self comes together, so there does not appear to be any one thing that unifies the self. Memory plays an important role, as can the creation of…
More than one way of being a self
Strawson’s counter points to what is perhaps the most important consequence of the bundle view. If the self is not a concrete, singular, stable thing, then we should not expect there to be only one way of being a self.
Bundles tied tighter and looser
If that’s right, then virtually every theory of self and personal identity has inevitably gone wrong, because they have sought a description of selves which neatly fits all cases. But bundles can be tied together differently, more tightly and more loosely. This does not mean…