Discontinuous Self
The discontinuous self is Nathan’s working answer to the question of personal identity: there is no continuous, unified “I” — only a fragmentary, provisional succession of states that share enough continuity (body, memory, conditioned pathways) to be usefully treated as one being. First articulated in a 2013-10-22 journal entry and restated independently across eleven years, it functions in his thinking as a load-bearing metaphysical commitment: the self as a useful fiction, an adaptation, a state machine — real enough to do work, never solid enough to worship. This page pairs the journal formulations with the two philosophical traditions they independently recapitulate: Hume’s bundle theory and Parfit’s psychological-continuity view.1
The journal formulations
2013-10-22 — the founding entry, written “against folks who talk about ‘the performance of the self’ or ‘the historic construction of the self’”:
“Very early on, I realized that I was a stranger to myself — that there were disconnects in the ‘I’, certainly day-to-day, and often, if one paid enough attention, within the day. What I found, as I considered myself, was that the ‘I’ was fragmentary and discontinuous… There is no ‘me’, at least in any continuous sense. There is what I was, what I am now, and what I extrapolate my future to be, and while these states share a degree of continuity of state (environment, physical body, the conditioned pathways of memory and reflex, etc.), they are really not, properly considered, the same being.
I die, and die again, to be replaced by something that is much like what came before but not the same.
…That there is an ‘I’ seems, at this point, undeniable. However, that the ‘I’ is only one aspect of ‘me’ — and in fact is a constantly changing, discontinuous aspect — is also undeniable… It’s just too useful of a thing. Given the usefulness of the ‘self’, I expect that other animals have developed it as well. There are probably different levels of complexity to different selves… The ‘self’ is just another adaptation, like hands or a vocal apparatus.”
2015-07-25 — the multis restated as multitude:
“I am empty. I am gestalt. I am legion. I am the nexus of communities. There is no ‘self’ for anything much more complicated than a single snippet of self-replicating RNA. Instead, there are multitudes, bound together. The ‘interests’ of the multitudes are like vectors, but it would be a mistake to call the sum of such vectors the ‘interest’ of that community. It is instead a direction, a tendency. It is always provisional.
Consciousness is a state machine designed to weight and tune the forces that work within me. But it is, of course, also one of the multitudes. The ‘I’ lives one moment in the past… The ‘I’ lives only at the top of the stack that makes up ‘me’. What other forces are tuning it?”
Later recurrences — the metaphysics persists, but the valence darkens: “Another past self I’ve inadvertently left behind” (2023-02-17, after his father’s death); “I am trapped in a cage of my own making” (2024-12-24).2
The philosophical anchors
Nathan is unsure what originally influenced the view. Two traditions supply its skeleton, and mapping to them clarifies what’s distinctive in his version:
Hume’s bundle theory (Treatise, 1739): the self is “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.” There is no unifying entity behind the perceptions — looking for it is like looking for the chain besides the links. Nathan’s 2015 “multitudes, bound together… a direction, a tendency, always provisional” is bundle theory with the vectors made explicit. Hume’s own famous worry in the Appendix — that he can’t explain what binds the bundle — is Nathan’s “what other forces are tuning it?”3
Parfit’s psychological-continuity view (Reasons and Persons, 1984): what matters in survival is not identity but psychological continuity and connectedness — overlapping chains of memory, intention, character. Parfit’s radical conclusion: identity is not what matters; a person can “die” (fission) and yet have everything that matters survive in two successors. Nathan’s “I die, and die again, to be replaced by something that is much like what came before” is the domestic, daily version of Parfit’s fission cases — the same claim, arrived at introspectively rather than via thought experiment. And Parfit’s ethic that follows — the separateness of persons is less deep than we think, so egoism is less rational — is a natural bridge to Nathan’s ethics (suffering-axioms, life-liberty-happiness-trilemma), where the boundary between self and world is similarly permeable.4
Where Nathan’s version diverges from both: the functionalist, evolutionary grounding. The self is “just another adaptation, like hands” — something selection built because extrapolating one’s own behavior forward and backward in time is too useful to forgo. This is closer to Dennett’s “center of narrative gravity” or Metzinger’s Ego Tunnel (the self as a model the brain runs) than to Hume or Parfit: the “I” is not an illusion, but a tool — “consciousness is a state machine designed to weight and tune the forces that work within me.” The 2015 question “what other forces are tuning it?” is the one the academic versions under-ask: if the self is a model, who else has their hands on the parameters?5
What it underlies in the wiki
- intelligence-as-tool — the direct sequel: if the self is a tool the meat runs, then “we are not ‘minds in meat suits’; we are meat that has found it occasionally convenient to wield mind.” The discontinuous self is why the AI conclusion doesn’t feel threatening: there was never a continuous essence to dethrone.
- suffering-axioms — the atonement imperative’s open problem: “what have I done that atones…” against an “I” that dies and is replaced daily. Atonement across a discontinuous self is either collective (the multitude atones) or narrative (the story atones), and the journal never settles which.
- logotherapy / tragic-optimism — Frankl needs a self strong enough to take a stance; the discontinuous self says the stance-taker is provisional. The resolution is that meaning is found in the task, not the task-holder — which is Frankl’s own move (“the meaning of the moment”), and why the two pages coexist without contradiction.
- impartial-spectator — Smith’s internalized judge is the social construction of a self that can view itself as another; the discontinuous self is the observation that the judge and the judged are never the same person twice.
- noosphere — Teilhard’s hyper-personal convergence assumes persons are the atoms that union differentiates; bundle theory suggests the atoms are themselves bundles, which is either a problem for Omega or an explanation of how union can differentiate without dissolving.
Tensions
- The agency problem: who atones, who chooses, who is responsible? The journal oscillates between “I” as useful shorthand and “I” as moral agent, and the external anchors don’t solve it — Parfit bites the bullet (identity doesn’t matter), Hume leaves the binding unexplained. Nathan’s “state machine” framing pushes the question down a level (the machine chooses) without dissolving it.
- The valence drift: 2013’s “it bothers me less now” to 2024’s “I am trapped in a cage of my own making” is the same metaphysics under different emotional lighting. Whether the discontinuity is liberating (no fixed self to defend) or imprisoning (no solid self to stand on) is a mood, not a theorem — and the journal is honest about both readings.
Sources
- Selected journal entries (Day One export, 2012–2024)
- Personal Identity
- Personal Identity