 The Personalist challenges Vasubandhu to explain how it can be, if everything is only a constantly-changing fluctuation of causally-connected separate entities, that things do not arise in predictable patterns. Why is there so much unpredictable change, the Personalists are asking, if there is no independent person who enacts those changes? This is a question that seems to be affirming a greater degree of freedom of the will than would appear possible were there not some outside, uncaused intervener in the causal flow. If I am reading it correctly, it is something like an incredulous denial that we could be “mere automatons,” given our capacities for innovation and creativity. Vasubandhu’s answer is to emphasize the possibility of change in a self-regulating  system.[21]