Continuity Beyond Memory: External Traces and Selfhood

This paper asks what grounds ordinary self-continuity across forgetting, reconstruction, sleep, amnesia, and social correction. Its central claim is that internal memory alone cannot explain how a self remains practically and narratively continuous over time. Human beings do not preserve continuity by storing a complete inner archive. They forget, compress, revise, and socially recalibrate their memories, yet still remain intelligible to themselves and to others as ongoing subjects. I argue that continuity is stabilized not only by mnemonic retention but also by alignment with a shared causal world: a publicly structured environment in which actions leave durable traces, roles persist, and later re-identification can succeed or fail. Notes, images, habits, roles, institutions, recurring stories, and other persons do not merely provide evidence of an already complete self; they help scaffold the practical continuity through which a self is maintained and repaired over time. This is a claim about maintenance, intelligibility, and re-identification, not a full solution to the metaphysics of personal identity. Its implication for artificial minds is limited but important: internalist dismissals of artificial selfhood are too quick.