The metaphysics of continuity of consciousness

The only mere physicists are the animals: they alone do not think: while man is a thinking being and a born metaphysician. The real question is not whether we shall apply metaphysics, but whether our metaphysics are of the right kind: in other words, whether we are not, instead of the concrete logical Idea, adopting one-sided forms of thought, rigidly fixed by understanding, and making these the basis of our theoretical as well as our practical work. (Hegel, Encyclopedia of the philosophical sciences in basic outline I, §98) This dissertation is a study in the metaphysics of continuity of consciousness. Naturally, the three ideas this dissertation involves with are that of metaphysics, continuity, and consciousness. Metaphysics, as it is often understood, is the study of the fundamental nature of reality. The closest discipline to metaphysics is physics, which too studies the nature of reality, but the subject matter of physics is concrete things, whereas metaphysics deals with both concrete and abstract entities. Also, physics may concern itself with a particular thing or a particular class of things, whereas metaphysics is seen as the study of reality in its totality. Lastly, unlike physics, metaphysics is not an empirical discipline- its fundamental method of enquiry is not observation or experimentation but logical postulations. Ontology is a subdiscipline of metaphysics that studies what kind of things fundamentally are there, or as it is often put, what there is. Ontology talks about the broadest categories of things, and the aim of every ontologist is to keep the number of these categories as minimum as possible. Therefore, an ontologist will not consider cars, laptops, and houses as different ontological categories, but they can be clubbed into one broader category of concrete.