Suppose an accident erased every memory of your childhood. Would you still be the person who lived it?
Memory feels like a bridge between who we were and who we are. If you can remember learning to ride a bike, it seems natural to say that the child in the story was you. But memories fade; a person can forget whole chapters of life and remain awake, continuous, and recognizably themselves.
A simple memory test also runs into a puzzle: if the young person remembers an earlier event and the older person remembers being young, must the older person remember the original event too? Memory does not always connect every stage in a neat chain. Philosophers therefore explore broader psychological continuity, bodily continuity, and other accounts. There is no agreed answer to what, exactly, makes a person persist.