The Reconceptualization of Continuity

The Problem of the Invariant Bearer

For centuries, philosophy of mind and personal identity have struggled with a central paradox: how can a person remain 'the same person' over time despite constant physical, mental, and experiential change?

To resolve it, classical metaphysics posited an invariant bearer: something that stays the same beneath the flow of change and carries identity through it. The bearer takes different forms in different traditions—an immortal, unchanging soul or self (ātman) in theology and spiritual philosophy; a persisting material substrate or stable neural core in physicalism; a thinking subject or unifying ego behind experience in Cartesian and transcendental accounts of the mind.

But the invariant bearer is a metaphysical illusion. If an entity were truly invariant and unconditioned, it could not interact with, perceive, or be affected by changing conditions. Substantialism creates an artificial problem by assuming that temporal continuity requires an unchanging 'noun' to carry changing 'verbs'.

Continuity Without Persistence

The analysis does not resolve the paradox of identity across time by putting causal patterning in the bearer's place. It dissolves the paradox: identity across time is designated, not found.

The classic illustration is a candle burning through the night. The flame at midnight is not identical with the flame at dusk; the wax, the oxygen and the light that make it up have all been replaced. Nor is it simply a different flame, unrelated to the first: conventionally it stands in a direct line with it, and we rightly say that the same candle has burned all night. No flame-substance travels through the hours to make this true. The continuity is designated on a succession that is neither identical nor wholly different.

Human personal identity operates in precisely the same way. The physical body, neural connections, emotional states, and conceptual memories are in a state of continuous flux. Nothing is found to persist across minutes or years—neither an invariant self nor a causal pattern standing in for one. 'The same person' is designated on moments that are neither identical nor wholly different (MMK 27).

Dōgen's firewood and ash (Chapter 5) make the same point from within each moment: firewood becomes ash, yet each abides in its own dharma position, which has a before and an after and yet is cut off from them. Continuity is not something that passes from one position to the next, but a designation laid across positions that are themselves designated, not found.

A Lived Example: An Old Photograph

Find a photograph of yourself as a small child. Is that you? Almost everyone says yes, and almost no one can say what makes it so. Hardly anything of that small body remains in yours; you do not remember the afternoon the picture was taken; you could not now think the child's thoughts or want what the child wanted. Point to what has stayed the same, and nothing is found. Yet 'yes, that's me' is not a mistake. Your family would say the same, the records agree, and a story runs from that afternoon to this one that you can tell and others can confirm.

This is continuity as designated. It is not found in the child, not in you, and not in some third thing threaded through the years; yet it is entirely valid within the framework of a life—birth certificates, family memory, habits that can be traced from then to now. The photograph does not show a self that has persisted. It shows how much the word 'I' can reliably gather across, with nothing underneath holding the gathering together.

Parfit's Reductionism and the Middle Way

The closest Western ally of this chapter is Derek Parfit. In Reasons and Persons (1984) he argued that personal identity is not what matters: a person's existence just consists in the occurrence of interrelated physical and mental events, and once this is seen, the question 'will it really be me?' loses its grip. Parfit noticed the resemblance to Buddhism himself, and included the Buddha's view in an appendix to the book.

The difference is instructive. Parfit's reductionism dissolves the person into events and then treats the events as what really exists—a move very close to the Abhidharma analysis described in Chapter 1, which emptied the self and left its constituents full. The Madhyamaka analysis does not stop there. The events into which the person is analysed are themselves designated, in dependence on further conditions and on the framework that distinguishes them; they are no more found than the person is. The person is designated on the aggregates, the aggregates on their conditions, and none of them is the ground of the rest.

Tsongkhapa draws the line more finely still. The person, he argues, is the 'mere I' (nga tsam): merely designated in dependence on the aggregates, yet identical with none of them—not the body, not consciousness, not their collection, and not their continuum. Other Buddhist schools located the self somewhere among the aggregates; the Prāsaṅgika locates it nowhere, while affirming it fully as a designation. This is Candrakīrti's chariot applied to the person (Madhyamakāvatāra 6.151 ff.). Against Parfit, the person is not reduced to events; against substantialism, it is not something over and above them. Nor is the mere I a thin self left over when the thick one has been refuted. It is no more findable than the inherent self, and it is valid only as designated (see Tsongkhapa, The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment, vol. 3; Ocean of Reasoning, tr. Garfield and Samten, 2006).

Memory, Habit, and Psychological Coherence Without a Substance

If there is no permanent self or mental substrate, how do memory, habit, and psychological character cohere over time?

Substantialism assumes that memories are 'stored' like physical objects inside a mental container or neural vault. On this analysis, memory and habit are designated on the regularities of experience, with no store and no stream beneath them.

A past experience conditions later experience, and the link between them is designated, not carried by anything that persists. When a memory is recalled, it is not an object retrieved from storage but a fresh appearance, formed in dependence on what happened then and on what is asked now—which is why memories shift with retelling, and why two people remember the same evening differently. Character and skill are like a melody learned by heart: each playing is new, none is the one before, and yet the tune is recognized across them all. The tune is not kept in some place between the playings. It is designated across them, and it is no less a tune for that.

Freedom from Permanence and Annihilation

Seen in this way, personal identity is freed from both extremes. It is not trapped in a fixed essence: because the person is designated rather than given, growth, change and release are possible, and the habits that seemed to define someone can loosen. Nor does change, or the ending of a life, plunge anything into a void; the changes themselves are designated in context and empty ultimately.

Objection: If No One Persists, Who Is Responsible?

If the self is only designated, who keeps a promise, repays a debt, or reaps what they have done? It may seem that a substrateless view dissolves responsibility along with the self.

It does the opposite. Responsibility is a conventional practice, and it requires exactly what conventional designation supplies: a person who can be reliably identified across time, whose actions have consequences, and who can be held to account by others. All of this holds conventionally, as Candrakīrti insists: the self that is not found under analysis is nonetheless designated in dependence on the aggregates, and as so designated it acts and experiences the results of its actions (Madhyamakāvatāra 6). In Tsongkhapa's terms, what is refuted is the inherently existing I; what acts, keeps promises and experiences results is the mere I, designated on the aggregates—and it is precisely because it is merely designated that it can bear responsibility and also change. Nāgārjuna devotes a chapter to action and its results, concluding that agent, action and result are all empty, and yet, like the creations of a magician, they function (MMK 17).

What a substantial self would add to responsibility is only rigidity. A fixed essence could not be changed by remorse, could not learn, and could not be transformed by practice—the very things responsibility hopes for. Freedom from permanence is not the loss of the person; it is what leaves room for a person to grow.