ABSTRACT

In “Of Personal Identity”, Hume attempts to understand why we ordinarily believe in persistent selves. He proposes that this ontological commitment depends on illusions and fictions: the imagination tricks us into supposing that an unchanging core self remains static through the flux and change of experience. Recent work in cognitive science provides a good deal of support for Hume’s hypothesis that common beliefs about the self are founded on psychological biases rather than rational insight or evidence. We naturally believe in personal persistence, according to this emerging research, because we are prone to categorize the world in terms of hidden essences and structure our lives in terms of whole life stories.

摘要

在“个人身份”中，休谟试图理解为什么我们通常相信持久的自我。他提出这种本体论承诺依赖于幻觉和虚构：想象力欺骗我们假设一个不变的核心自我通过经验的流动和变化而保持静止。认知科学领域的最新工作为休谟的假设提供了大量支持，即关于自我的共同信念是建立在心理偏见而非理性洞察力或证据之上的。根据这项新兴研究，我们很自然地相信个人坚持，因为我们倾向于根据隐藏的本质对世界进行分类，并根据整个生活故事来构建我们的生活。