Jessica asked:

Is there an enduring self?

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If there is to be any sense of self, there must be endurance. As you probably know, the logical
analysis of personal identity normally reduces the self to I-Now. If a person loses all memory, he
would not be enduring, but there is no reason that he would not be a person and have available to
him the subjective awareness of "I-Now". However, this is a logical analysis of the self, an analysis of
something which already exists, and this atomistic notion of the self depends on the idea of the
enduring self. Only once we have the concept of an enduring self can we strip away the essentials to
the I-Now. The reason for this dependence is that to gain a notion of the self as I-Now in the first
place, we have to distinguish ourselves from objects. This is a process and so it requires endurance.
A visual sensation is not sufficient to distinguish an object as spatial; one has to go on to identify its
tactile identity in space. This is a temporal process which is a necessary starting pointing in providing
us with an identity as a self as distinct from something else. However, if we had the experience of
only one object, we would not acquire the idea of a world outside us, or the notion of space in which
more than one thing exists, which is necessary for us to understand the singular thing (eg oneself).
Sufficient endurance to experience enough objects such that one acquires an idea of external space,
oneself as in external space, and as distinct from other objects is required for the idea of the self.

There are two senses of time involving endurance. Firstly, there is 4-dimensional space-time in which
we are finding out about objective space, moving in it and distinguishing objects. Secondly, there is
subjective or psychic time, the sense of duration in which thought moves. This second sense differs
from the first in that it cannot be measured in 4-dimensional time and it is private. In the mind, there is
no distinct contiguity — ie, when we think, we also perceive and act and cannot determine temporal
relations within this complexity of activity. In terms of the purely mental, when we close our eyes and
do not perceive, duration is not measurable in terms which are relative to space. An enduring mental
self would endure purely temporally. (see Henri Bergson's Time and Free Will.This is not a modern
book but I think that it is compatible with modern neuroscientifiic theory of mind. However, the self is
only such if it is initially spatio-temporal and acquires concepts from the world and others.

The self must persist in both senses of endurance before we analyse it and this isn't normally
acknowledged by those who seek to define personal identity in terms of what is logically necessary
after the self exists.

Rachel Browne