Perdurantism

About a year back I was daydreaming and began pondering identity. Looking back at the person I was as a child, or even as a teenager relative to who I am now, I can surely say that although I retain some behavioural traits I am overall a different person. I started framing the question to myself from the perspective of an animated character. In classical animation, a character is drawn and redrawn multiple times per second to give the illusion of motion. Putting myself in the animated character's shoes, I then imagined each new frame (drawing of the character at a different location in time) as a new identity, or a related but new conscious entity. From each frame's perspective, it is, has always been, and always will be the being inhabiting it's particular physical form. The reason it should believe this is because it has access to information from the past that has all happened revolving around the body's location in space, and it currently inhabits that same form. Just as each animated character at each frame in time believes it has always inhabited the body it calls home, for the simple reason that it has access to information from that body's past, so too do people. As I was saying before, I'm not the same person I was as a young child. I believe the physical state of the brain that made up that conscious identity no longer exists and is therefore, dead. I only believe that that identity was me because I can remember events that happened to it, from it's perspective in space. The same will be true in the future. The man i am now will slowly fade into the man I will become and what I am today will cease to exist. But whatever comes next will have all the knowledge available to it, and inhabit the same point in space as I once did, and thus will believe that it and I are the same thing. The view I'm taking as I later found out, is a sub-group of Perdurntism known as Exdurantism (Stage Theorists). Exdurantism claims that things exist only in temporally discrete parts. A quick quote from wikipedia to clarify

Stage theorists take you to be identical with a particular temporal part at any given time. So, in a manner of speaking, a subject only exists for an instantaneous period of time. However there are other temporal parts at other times which that subject is related to in a certain way (Sider talks of 'modal counterpart relations', whilst Hawley talks of 'non-Humean relations') such that when someone says that they were a child, or that they will be an elderly person, these things are true, because they bear a special "identity-like" relation to a temporal part that is a child (that exists in the past) or a temporal part that is an elderly person(that exists in the future). Stage theorists are sometimes called 'exdurantists'.

This seemed to be a particularly hard post to articulate, but I hope I have gotten across the gist of the idea I'm trying to portray.