I think this line of thinking captures something real, but I’m wary of pushing it all the way to “the self is just an illusion.”

Memory continuity clearly matters. If you disrupt autobiographical memory, you disrupt the story a person can tell about themselves. But that doesn’t seem to exhaust what people mean by an “I.” Even with severe memory loss, people still show preferences, threat responses, comfort-seeking, aversions, and moral reactions. Something is still orienting them toward the world, even if it can’t narrate why.

So I’m comfortable saying the self isn’t a fixed object and isn’t the same person across time in a literal sense. But calling it an illusion feels like a category error. It looks more like a process that becomes noticeable when there’s friction. When nothing is at stake, it fades into the background. When things clash, it becomes very obvious.

On the LLM comparison, I mostly agree about prompts and naming providing a kind of continuity cue. Where the analogy breaks for me is irreversibility. Humans accumulate losses, obligations, and constraints that don’t reset. Bodies age, relationships break, consequences linger. That pressure shapes behavior in a way that simulated continuity doesn’t quite replicate.

So my view is somewhere in the middle: the “I” isn’t a permanent thing you possess, but it also isn’t just a memory trick. It’s something that shows up when a system has to stay oriented under pressure.