iwpoe wrote:

1. Hume claims that there is no internal impression of the ego (we'll call this the empirical ego, using Kantian terminology), thus we cannot know the mind. This follows trivially from his particular empiricist epistemology.
2. Hume's entire philosophical account makes reference to and relies upon mental faculties (sensation, memory, rational faculties, imagination, etc).
3. But "when I turn inward" not only do I not see an empirical ego, I also do not see any of the faculties of the ego. Rather, I only see their products, i.e. I never see an object called memory producing a memory, but rather I only have the experience of a memory occur before me with no "impression" of its source.
4. Thus, I should be unable to know the faculties of the mind.

Well, I am anything but a Hume expert and I don't have my copy of the Treatise at hand, but I suppose one might attempt to infer (or, rather, might do so out of habit) from objects of various types (ideas and impressions of varying strength? of varying content?) to sameness of "cause" in faculties (sensation, memory, rationality, imagination).

That account faces some difficulties. Hume's account of causation and induction in terms of constant conjunction takes as its matter a lot of observed A-s causing B-s, but in this case one does not observe the purported cause. (Though Hume writes about this latter sort of inference in his Dialogues, correct?) But then there's a more general problem of how regularities are described. Hume wants a parsimonious account of mental objects according to which ideas and impressions differ only in degree/strength, but if they can therefore be described as falling under the same kind, then why should one infer to several faculties rather than just one?

Post this either on the subreddits of r/askphilosophy or r/philosophy. There are a few professional philosophers there that have strong grasps of anti-realism and Hume's approach to causation. You might get an answer to your formulation. 

Yeah, just stick to the former. The latter often devolves into a shitstorm. 

dingodile wrote:

It seems to me that belief in the existence of a persisting self (for lack of a better term) is properly basic, in Plantinga's sense. That's not to say that reasons can't be offered in support of it, but those reasons tend to be different in kind from the kind we adduce for most other existence claims. They are, in Kant's sense, transcendental, i.e., necessary as a precondition of making other kinds of sense of things. Even Hume's "constant conjunction" account of causation presupposes some continuous vantage point from which "constant" can be noticed. Without that, we have only a temporal string of impressions, each a kind of windowless monad.

Some contemporary philosophers of mind are hyperventilating over the supposed "convergence"  between cognitive neuroscience and Buddhism's doctrine of "no-self". Personally, I see this convergence as a mark of the failure of both. For what it's worth, I think Barry Dainton (Liverpool) is doing some interesting work in this area. His short book, The Self, is worth a read.
 

I'm not even sure Buddhism's doctrine amounts to an ontological claim. It seems to be some kind of ethico-practical doctrine about the importance of a practice of detachment from one's public identity. There's a fascinating line about this in Zen and the Art of archery where the archery teacher replies to a ontological objection as if that's entirely beside the point.

Last edited by iwpoe (3/13/2016 10:51 pm)