The Paradox of Momentary Awareness and Persistent Identity
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: The Paradox of Momentary Awareness and Persistent Identity examines the longstanding tension between the flickering, discontinuous nature of conscious awareness and the remarkable stability of personal identity. Traditional accounts treat awareness as a continuous experiential stream and identity as a narrative or memory-based construction, but this division obscures the deeper structural relationship between them. This paper reframes both awareness and identity as expressions of orientation within a relational manifold. Awareness is the local orientation of the manifold at a given moment; identity is its global orientation across time. Persistence emerges not from memory, narrative, or experiential continuity, but from the stability of this underlying structural attractor. By dissolving the false continuity assumptions embedded in mainstream theories, the paper offers a unified relational ontology of consciousness—one capable of explaining subjective time, trauma, change, and the enduring sense of self without relying on substance metaphysics or narrative psychology.
Author: Bailey, Denis
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7222584425
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