Descarte's Argument For The Existence Of The Self?

Descartes famously a rationalist believed that true knowledge about the world comes from reason and without experience. Descartes initiated his claim about the self by doubting. He doubted everything, including his own existence, and that doubt itself is the only certainty. Accordingly, he assumed that his thoughts were the only thing not to be doubted. The answer to his existence was his cogito argument, “I think, therefore I am”; ‘cogito ergo sum’. This means that the existence of a thinking substance is necessary in order to do the thinking, and in order to think one must therefore exist. Descartes argues for the existence of the soul which does the thinking, as once you reflect on what it is to think, you can't make sense of the idea that
Yet, the self has no impression corresponding to it. This is because the idea of the self must be persisting and constant, which contrasts to the non-persisting impressions by which all knowledge comes from. He writes, “I never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.” From this, he argues that the rationalist arguments, such as Descartes’, are wrong to speak of the soul, as their idea of the soul is mistaken for this very reason. Hume speaks of perception to explain his view-point. He says that when you perceive things from a perspective, your self is never part of the content. For example, we may have a perception of 'heat or cold, light or shade', but you can never actually perceive yourself. Therefore, bare perception is not possible in regard to the self as he states, "I never can catch myself at any time without perception." In other words, when you go looking for a perception what you will find is the thing that you perceive and not the thing doing the perceiving. Accordingly, 'you' are the thing that has the experiences and as a result cannot also be an object of those experiences, and so there is no impression corresponding to the self.