In Jain दर्शन, this point is answered by distinguishing paryāya and dravya.

• Knowing events change — this is the changing mode, or paryāya.
• The knower does not vanish with each moment of knowing — this is the enduring substance, the jīva.

Jainism does not say that the eternal knower is seen as a separate object in ordinary perception. Rather, it says:

1. Experience shows changing cognitions.
2. Change itself presupposes a continuing substratum.
3. Without an enduring jīva, memory, karmic bondage, karmic fruition, and liberation cannot be coherently explained.

So from the Jain view, continuity is not just “conditions without a self.” Conditions explain how the jīva’s states change, but they do not replace the need for the continuing subject that undergoes those states.

Jain reply to your main claim

You say: “Knowing occurs, but an eternal knower is not thereby established.”

Jainism would respond:

• If there is only a stream of conditioned knowing, then who is the same one who remembers?
• Who bears karmic impressions from one moment to the next?
• Who becomes liberated if there is no persisting subject to be freed?

For Jainism, these are not merely functional questions. They point to a real jīva that is:

• conscious by nature,
• beginningless,
• enduring through change,
• and capable of liberation when karmic bondage is removed.

On the concern about self-clinging

Jainism does not accept an eternal self in the sense of ego, ownership, or worldly identity. What it affirms is the pure jīva, not the deluded “I am the body” notion.

So the Jain position is:

• Substance is real.
• Function/mode is real.
• Change does not cancel continuity.
• Continuity without a substance is incomplete.

In short: Buddhist causal continuity may explain sequence, but Jainism holds that sequence requires a real enduring conscious substance as its basis.