David Hume On Personal Identity

Each time I gaze into a mirror, or respond to a question or assert a preference that requires a personal perspective, ‘I’ thereby assume an idea of personal identity. As ordinary common sense dictates, that personal perspective is my own insofar as I maintain a sense of ownership of my personal identity. In this view of ordinary common sense, ‘I’ assume ownership in light of the perception of ‘me’, ‘I’, or ‘myself’ (my emphasis). However, in Hume’s view, to have first-person perception of me is to have experiences of bundles of impressions from past experiences that are as temporally distant as my youth, yet as temporally local as now. Accordingly, phenomenal experiences of personal identity occur in constant conjunctions of experiential data