David Hume’s Idea of the Self and the Society-Organism
Aug 20, 2020
In Book 1 of A Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume laid out his principle of the self which is based on how pure consciousness perceives entities in existence, without the usual human limitations arising from the deceptive force of Nature which the Hindus call Maya.
Each self is a subjective artificial construct made by the perceiving entity, which in the human case is consciousness. Hume gives the following examples:
- A ship that has been repaired is a different ship from itself when it was new. However, human mind makes a convention to see it as the same ship.
- A mountain that has some dirt from it removed is a different mountain from the original one. However, the human mind sees it as the same mountain.
- A baby that has grown into a man was a different entity from that man. However, the human mind sees it as the same person.
- An oak seed is a different entity from the oak tree that it grows into. However, the human mind sees it as the same oak.
Each soul has 3 billion selves
Human convention or habit assigns the same identity because it would take a lot of mental effort to classify one ship or one tree into different ships or trees with every single change in it and then retain them in memory for comparison. A 20-year old man will not only have 20 selves and not even 7,300 selves (20 * 365), but 630,720,000 selves if his smallest perception is in seconds! If humans live for 100 years, then each human soul will experience 3,153,600,000 selves in a lifetime, and even more if we can naturally perceive milliseconds.
The rest of the post is on our site: https://superphysics.org/medical/mental/principles/idea-of-self/
