The Waking Self Problem - Record-Continuity, Narrative Identity, and the Deflation of Primitive Persistence

This paper argues that the ordinary sense of personal identity across interruption is stronger than the ontology needed to explain conscious continuity. We ordinarily speak as if the self that wakes is simply the same self that previously fell asleep, as if numerical identity persisted through sleep, anesthesia, forgetting, and other interruptions of experiential continuity. But the real explanatory work is better assigned elsewhere. What matters is not the persistence of a primitive metaphysical ego, but the structured inheritance of subject-constituting records. The central claim is that a later conscious state counts as a continuation of an earlier one insofar as it preserves and integrates enough of the earlier state’s record-structure in the right way. What ordinary language calls “the same self” is therefore not an ontological primitive but a narratively stabilized compression imposed on a chain of record-integrated experiential configurations. This view does not deny continuity. It explains it without appealing to an enduring substance, a privileged bodily token, or a bare first-person fact of persistence. The paper develops this claim through what I call the waking self problem: on what basis does the subject who wakes identify itself with the subject who previously fell asleep? Standard appeals to bodily continuity, brain continuity, or immediate first-person certainty are shown to be either explanatorily indirect or metaphysically excessive. A record-based account does better. It preserves what is practically and phenomenologically important in personal identity while rejecting the stronger fiction of primitive persistence. The argument also connects with a broader record-based framework developed elsewhere: if subjecthood is individuated by subject-constituting informational structure, then diachronic continuity should also be understood in structural rather than substantial terms.