It is tempting to assume that if something persists over time, it must remain the same entity. Continuity and identity are often conflated: a chair, a cell, or a person is thought to be the same because it persists through change. Yet persistence is a relational achievement, not a guarantee of metaphysical identity.
Persistence as Relational Stabilisation
What persists is a pattern of relations that maintains sufficient stability for coordination, recognition, and interaction. A biological organism retains identity because its relational structure—genetic, physiological, functional—remains coherent over time. A social role persists because norms, recognition, and repeated interactions hold it in place.
Changes in internal or external relations do not necessarily destroy persistence; they can transform it while maintaining enough continuity to allow identification.
Identity Is Not Given
Identity is not an intrinsic property carried through time. It is a perspectival assessment: something is identified as the same entity because observers, systems, or conventions treat it as such.
Consider a river: water flows, banks erode, species move in and out—but the river persists in discourse, maps, and ecological understanding. Its identity is relational, contingent on perspective, and maintained through patterns of interaction and construal.
Similarly, quantum systems, organisms, and social entities show that persistence often outlives rigid identity assumptions. We track patterns, not immutable essences.
Implications for Objects
Recognising that persistence is not identity undermines the metaphysical idea of fixed objects. Objects do not maintain continuity through intrinsic substance; they maintain it through relational stability.
Breakdowns—fusion of quantum particles, cellular differentiation, social role changes—highlight that identity is an emergent, context-dependent property. Persistence is not enough to claim metaphysical primacy.
From Continuity to Trajectory
If identity is perspectival and persistence relational, then objects are better understood as trajectories: sequences of stabilised relational patterns over time. A trajectory captures continuity without appealing to intrinsic essence.
Thinking in terms of trajectories unites insights across domains: physics, biology, and social systems all instantiate the same principle. Entities are patterns in motion, not static things.
Looking Ahead
The next post, The Error of Asking “What Is It?”, will show why seeking the essence of a thing is a misapplied metaphysical habit. By reframing objects as relationally stabilised trajectories, we dissolve the persistent but misleading urge to ask “what is it?” and prepare the conceptual ground for moving from thing to trajectory.
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