Outline of Video Four: "Is There an Enduring Self?"

• It seems like we have an enduring self, but is it something real?
• Practically (e.g., for legal purposes, promises) it is useful to think we have an enduring self
• Descartes: the immaterial thinking self/soul is a constant substance
• Locke: memory links personal identity
• Hume & contemporary thinkers: the self is an illusion, a way of organizing experience, a network of beliefs and desires linked linguistically; the unity of character
• Buddhism: the self is the seer that is never seen

Outline of Video Thirteen, part 2: "Does All Knowledge Depend Upon Experience?"

• Empiricism: we acquire knowledge and determine truth based ultimately on (revisable) experience
• Hume: without experience (impressions) the mind has no knowledge
• Cause-effect is known only by experience (constant conjunction)
• Our experience is not universalizable, inapplicable to future, or grounded in external objects
• Knowledge of future and world is based on custom and imagination
• Criticism of empiricism: there are no intermediary representations
• Quine: updated empiricism
• Our experience is a web of beliefs, not a collection of discrete experiences
• Language is learned through the experience of behaviors
• Induction is an instinct