from my class on William James

Journal #2

Hume makes an astute observation by noticing that through introspection, we seem to come up with a notion of self so varied and seemingly changeable that it is just a flux of sensations and ideas. We might posit that the evidence of our essential self having some static quality is memory. It presents a problem though, because as a general rule, we don’t have any recollection of birth, and memory records nothing for a significant amount of time following birth, so the beginning of a chain of memory known as self is a sort of hazy fading in of recollections of sensory and other information. Even then we run into problems because our memories feel linked together in our minds, but when we try to explain them we run into some serious problems: we tell stories out of chronological order, we can’t remember who was where, names get forgotten, we forget words we purportedly said, etc. In short, if it is only memory that gives us evidence of a self, there are some big gaps that are hard to explain empirically. Nonetheless, we are able to recall key events consistently, and I think we do rely on these recollections for some sort of consistency in our mental construction of self.

Do we give credence to the notion that our memories link together and that is a sufficient construction to be called a self? I’m not really sure it is enough to refute Hume’s argument or to accommodate our everyday experience. On the other hand, I’m not so sure we should have any problem when issues come up in that sort of a construction; everything else in our world is in just as much flux. We like to say that large objects, like mountains, are constant in some way, are static, but if we start to look at them with just a slight empirical twist, we discover that billions and billions of atoms are moving around in those same mountains; some particles being scraped off, others being deposited by wind and weather, and the geologists tell us the whole mass of particles known as mountain is moving (!) anyway . In time, zoom out a little to where you are looking at a range of even a few hundred thousand years, and the amount of time it takes for a mountain to get leveled compared to the amount of time it takes for you to forget someone’s name might not really be that different. If time is infinite (again, !), a million years to form a landscape and a few weeks for you to forget where you hid your spare key aren’t really that different at all, so the link between memories is just as consistent as anything else. The fact that perhaps there is no mountain now is not a barrier to saying that there once was. Likewise, just because a person has died and we have no empirical evidence of a self available to us, maybe it shouldn’t raise any objections to our saying that at least there once was, and in the case of my self and the mountain still standing, there is right now.

(This doesn't address my belief that there is a soul in man, and though perhaps impossible to prove by human means (but not necessarily impossible to know), I think there is something deep and real about being human that gives people reason to believe they have a self/soul, and I think they are right. Even though I have a hard time justifying the belief by anything strictly rational, I am thoroughly convinced that there is something in me and every other person that is unbreakable, infinite, and undying. That is a soul.)