Is continuity just causation? Is continuity just causation?

When a fire is caused by a spark, is that the same kind of continuity as there is in the dependent origination of the skandhas, just with different causes and effects?
When we speak about causation we're used to thinking in terms of discrete entities interacting and causing distinct events. This is normal in materialistic view, ever obsessed with discreteness. However, when we speak about continuity, we are in the analogue world - where everything morphs and flows, and where individual "things" and "events" are more like the sums of the amplitudes of multiple intersecting waves rather than truly isolated entities.

Also, in Dependent Origination we are not as much talking about causation as we're talking about what Charles Sanders Peirce called "the habit formation", or the tendency of tendencies to self-perpetuate and grow.

You know how in men toilets there is a self-perpetuating tendency for the floor under the urinal to get wet? (It self-perpetuates by causing men to stand further away.) The same exact principle is behind Dependent Origination, and, according to Peirce, behind Evolution at large.

Mind is integrated information, regardless of media. Accumulation of regular patterns leads to development of mind's faculty of recognition, and mind's tendency to form habits and to seek comfort in familiar experiences. This in turns leads to emergence of purposeful activity towards comfortable experiences. This tendency self-perpetuates and develops into a full-blown Umwelt, complete with "objects", "other living beings" and "I".

So yeah, continuity and causation are two alternative descriptions of essentially same thing, but the tendency for habit formation is the real key in D.O.