The perdurantist escape from the problem is, however, somewhat problematic in and of itself. The first major problem I wish to address with the perdurantist view is that, like arguments that Dualists might put forward, it entails the inclusion of entities into one’s ontology that are in violation of the empiricist principle; the space-time worm is not an object that is ever wholly present at any given time, and the human perceptive faculties can only directly experience three dimensions. If the perdurantist wants to argue that all that is present of an object at any given time is a four dimensional time slice, I posit that they cannot hold that there is any object continuity and simultaneously hold that they follow the empiricist principle, as the time slices, and not the space-time worm, are what are presented to our perceptive faculties and are what we experience. Again, it seems, Ockham’s Razor may be invoked in the culling of the extra ontological load that perdurantism requires; however even if this is not the case, perdurantism is far from saved.

Another particularly vexing problem that arises, if the perdurantists want to allow space-time worm fusion or merging, is that they can hardly hope to argue for transtemporal identity; for it seems that there is nothing precluding an infinite number of space worms replacing one another on a continuous timescale. The scheme I have in mind to elucidate the matter is one in which I perceive a time slice of an object’s space-time worm at one time, and then at in an immediately subsequent time I perceive an otherwise spatially identical time slice of a separate, distinct space-time worm (it is worth noting that this paradigm can operate even under an infinitesimally small amount of time has pbumed). I am certain that I would be incapable of determining whether the two sequential time slices that I perceived belong to the same space-time worm, in which case there would be transtemporal identity, or if there were two worms that had interchanged for one another in between my first and second experiences of the time slices in question. An extension of this problem of overlapping worms is that it may even be possible that at any one time, a particular object being perceived is composed of spatially identical time slices from any number of fused space-time worms; it seems unclear as to whether or not this would be a case of perceiving one object, or of perceiving many spatio-temporally coincident objects, and I do not believe the perdurantists provide sufficient means for determining this matter.

Ultimately, the introduction of worm merging (as accepted in Heller’s conclusions and explored to some depth above) apparently enables one to explode the notion of continuity under perdurantism by simply hypothesizing a multiplicity of similar, successive (or fused) space-time worms. It might be argued that a god’s eye point of view would be capable of distinguishing between space-time worms and could keep track of whether or not transtemporal identity is maintained, but as mere humans would not be privy to such a point of view, such a response would not serve to enable perdurantists to escape their current predicament, nor allow us to have any hope for grounding transtemporal identity in experiences.