David Hume, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher infamous, and now famous, for being skeptical not just about the claims of religion, but also the existence of the self, a subject that’s still scientifically unsettled, was found to be philosophers’ favorite, overwhelmingly, in an international poll conducted in November 2009 by David Chalmers, now co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness at New York University, who along with his then-PhD advisee, David Bourget, asked over 2,500 of their colleagues—professors and graduate students alike—among other things, with which dead thinker they most identified. (Why David Hume Is So Hot Right Now — https://nautil.us/why-david-hume-is-so-hot-right-now-235969)
Hume wrote, “For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist. And were all my perceptions removed by death, and could I neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate after the dissolution of my body, I should be entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive what is farther requisite to make me a perfect non-entity. If any one, upon serious and unprejudiced reflection thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I call reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continued, which he calls himself; though I am certain there is no such principle in me.” (Hume’s Bundle Theory of the Self — https://selfrealization.blog/2018/09/20/humes-bundle-theory-of-the-self/)
That is precisely the error that Hume made in that he did not realize that the he was that “I” that was “looking” into the theatre of the mind and not finding himself, some “I’ which he was looking for, there.
That awareness, Hume, that awareness, is what is the “true I”.
