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Who am I?
Locke’s theory of personal identity describes what makes the person of our past
memories, the same as the person now. He clearly states that he does not believe that being a
person is identical to being a substance. Rather, he describes personal identity as derived from
consciousness, the thing that is able to be aware of its experience whether of thinking or using
reason or reflection. He says “to find in what personal identity consists, we must consider what
person stands for; this, I think, is a thinking intelligent being that has reason and reflection, and
can consider itself as itself.”(Chapter XXVII-9, Essay) Locke says that to have the ability to
taste, feel, hear, and smell, we must have the ability to know that we are doing so, and this ability
is the underlying awareness or consciousness that is the bridge that links the consciousness to
experiences in the past.
Past experiences where we recall tasting, feeling or smelling something, had at the time
the awareness that we were tasting, feeling, and smelling that thing then, and that awareness is
the thing or “person” that doesn’t change. So Locke describes the unchanging “person”, or
personal identity, as the consciousness experiencing the self, or unchanging thinking being
distinguished from other thinking beings. Locke does make the distinction clear between self and
substance. He notes that the consciousness does have interruptions, consisting of forgetfulness
and moments of deep sleep in which there are no thoughts at all. He says, “This, however
reasonable or unreasonable, does not concern personal identity at all, the question being what
makes the same person, and not whether it is the same identical substance which always thinks in
that same person..” (Chapter XXVII-10, Essay). So as far as Locke is concerned, the identity, not

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to be confused with the changing substances within the identity, is the unchanging experience
derived from the consciousness that connects past and present conscious experiences in one
unified life.
Hume, however, takes a different approach to the idea of self. Hume’s makes the
argument that any one idea comes from a single impression, and for self, as an idea, to rise from
one impression, it would need to be unchanging, and in the same manner without changing,
which it doesn’t. Hume says “Every real idea must arise from some single impression. But self or
person is not any one impression, but is rather that to which all our many impressions and ideas
are supposed to be related.” (6: personal identity, Hume). He says that our perceptions are never
constant, that in any given moment we are perceiving heat or cold, light or darkness, love or
hate, and these impressions are never constant. His bundle theory defines people as bundles of
different perceptions always changing, and because of this there is no definite thing called “self”.
He relates the notions of “self” and diversity as nearly identical ideas. The so called “self” he
describes as what people think of as the object that remains invariable and uninterrupted
throughout time (like Locke’s idea of self or consciousness) is often thought of as distinct from
diversity which refers to the thoughts or mental activity that is constantly changing from one
time to another.
Hume however sees them as almost one in the same object. He says “The action of the
imagination by which we consider the uninterrupted and invariable object and that by which we
reflect on the succession of related objects are almost the same to the feeling, nor is there much
more effort of thought required in the latter case than in the former. The relation facilitates the
transition of the mind from one object to another and renders its passage as smooth as if it
contemplated one continued object.” (6: Personal Identity, Hume) His claim is that since we

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often perceive the identity and diversity of our thoughts to be so closely related they actually
effect our views of identity, and confuse the diverse objects in mind which are constantly
changing, as one continuous object, or experience, that is not changing, when in reality, by
Hume’s argument, those objects or events are actually completely separate objects that we
falsely perceive as continuous experiences. He says we are so prone to make this mistake, that
we continue to fall into the idea that we are experiencing a single identity, over time, but we are
truly but a bundle of objects and perceptions, that are so closely related, that we mistake them all
to be a part of one continuous experience. I (not quite sure what the meaning behind “I” is at this
point but I’ll continue) think of it like this, we think of ourselves as a person that has experiences
that are viewed from the vantage point of our identity. One might conclude that their identity is a
manifestation of the thoughts, feelings, and experiences that they perceive as their own.
However, taking Hume’s argument to be true those events are actually just so closely related that
we believe them to be part of our identity. For example, one might grow up in a close knit
family, which spends a great portion of their time with each other. That person might see the
other members of the household as part of their identity (they identify themselves as part of the
family), because their general experience with the family has been so closely related to other
experiences, they mistakenly believe they have a self, who is the family, and thus have a
distorted perception of their identity. A problem with Hume’s argument is an explanation for the
immediate experience of past memories. Locke might argue that Hume’s position doesn’t
account for that particular experience. One might use inference to the best explanation to assume
that by having memories of previous experiences, there’s no clear reason to believe we didn’t
exist then. Since we have those experiences of existing then in the present, it should follow that
we existed then, as we do now, and thus have existed continuously by way of an underlying self.

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Thomas Reid made an argument to Locke’s inference in that it becomes contradictive
when we forget or lose memories of past experiences. For example, let’s say a child in 1st grade
gets in a fight at school and gets suspended. When he is in high school, he becomes a state
champion wrestler, and still has the memory of the fight from 1st grade. Then at the age of 30, he
becomes an astronaut, and becomes the first person to land on Saturn, at which time he
remembers winning the state championship, but has no memory of the fight when he was in 1st
grade. By Locke’s inference, he is the same person at 30 years old as he was in high school, and
the high school wrestler is the same as the 1st grade fighter, thus the 30 year old is the same
person as the 1st grade student. Yet if he has no memory of the 1st grader, there is no connection
to that past self, thus they are not the same person. There is a contradiction in such instances, in
that there is a gap between different events in memory, that can’t sensibly be closed to infer an
underlying self, by the inference to the best explanation argument for identity.
Also, memories are often easily influenced in a way to bring about distortions of false
believes. Psychologists have been studying distortions in eyewitness testimonies based on certain
questions or trigger words asked, as well as falsity in relation to suppressive memories. The
likelihood of distorted memories should be evidence enough to rule out inference to the best
explanation when denouncing Hume’s arguments against the likelihood of the underlying self. I
do find Hume’s argument makes much more sense to me than Locke’s, in that it breaks down
the, in my opinion, false idea of identity, and shows that the objects that we hold in our minds
and the experiences we apparently have are just very closely related, separate objects that we
confuse as the self. I think if you present the arguments to different people obviously there will
be different responses, but those who argue for the idea of a continuous conscious self, don’t

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quite understand the distinction between self and closely related experiences that are mistaken
for a single thing.