6 ideas
The Nyāya argument holds that a judgement like 'I who saw this apple am now touching it' combines a visual and a tactile experience into one recognition. No single sense faculty has access to both, and a stream of momentary states could not recognise that the two belong together. So there must be an enduring subject that owns both experiences and carries the past one into the present.
Buddhist reductionism treats 'I' the way 'chariot' is treated: as a convenient label applied to a causally connected bundle of physical and mental constituents (the five aggregates). No further owner exists over and above the bundle. The facts about memory, agency and responsibility can be fully stated in impersonal terms about the parts and their causal relations.
The Prābhākara Mīmāṃsā view holds that each cognition presents three things at once: the object, the cognition itself, and the knower. On this view the self is not found by introspecting on experience later. It is given in the structure of any experience as the pole to which the object appears, so first-person awareness is built into ordinary perception.
Experiences feel like 'mine' because a subject takes a first-person stance toward them. That stance involves immersion in the experience and endorsement of it as one's own. On this view, mineness is something a subject does rather than a metaphysical owner it has. This lets the phenomenology of selfhood be kept while an enduring soul-substance is denied.
Buddhaghosa models mind as a resting life-continuum (bhavaṅga) that is disturbed by a stimulus. It then runs through an ordered sequence of stages: - adverting to the object - sensing it - receiving it - investigating it - determining it - responding with active, karmically loaded impulsions At each step attention selects the object and places it before the mind, and this shapes how the object is experienced.
The unifying, selecting and directing functions that self-theorists assign to an inner subject are performed by attention. Attention picks out objects, holds experiences together and orients action.