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Anatta
Anatta (Sanskrit: anatman) is the Buddhist doctrine of not-self: there is no permanent, unified self underlying experience. What we call “the self” is instead a collection of impermanent mental and physical processes with no fixed core.
Moral responsibility
Moral responsibility is the status of being worthy of praise or blame for one's actions, typically requiring that the agent acted freely, with knowledge of what they were doing, and with the capacity to have done otherwise.
Psychological Continuity
Psychological continuity, associated with John Locke, is the view that personal identity consists in overlapping chains of memory, consciousness, and psychological connection linking earlier and later stages of a person's life, prioritising mental over physical continuity as the criterion of personal identity.
Reductionism about the self
Reductionism about the self is the view that the self is not a separately existing entity but can be reduced to patterns of sense experience and bodily states. Ayer argues that 'I' is a logical construction rather than a reference to a soul or substance, drawing on Hume's bundle theory.
Substantialist Account
Substantialist account: the view that the self is a genuine, persisting entity that unifies experience over time, contrasting with deflationary accounts that reduce the self to simpler processes or deny its existence altogether.