An idea · Early Modern · first attested 1739
The Bundle Theory of the Self
There is no inner observer. Only a bundle of perceptions.
Hume's introspective experiment: try to catch yourself, the self that has experiences. You can't. You only ever find a particular thought, a particular sensation, a particular memory, a particular feeling – never the thing that has them. The self, he concludes, is a bundle of perceptions, held together by memory and habit. Buddhist philosophers, two thousand years earlier, had argued something similar.