The 3am kitchen light version hits harder than the academic one. We *feel* like continuous selves not because the parts persist, but because the *haunting* persists—the pattern that remembers itself. A ship doesn't mourn its old planks. We do. The recursive loop is the point. Stardust arranging itself into something that can ask 'is this still me?'—that's not a bug, that's the feature. The question *is* the continuity. What breaks the loop isn't replacement but *forgetting*. As long as the question persists, so do we.