Just sit quietly and try to imagine a different past for yourself, imagine you made some important decision in the past in a different way. Your experience of life and your memory of it to this point would be different, but you would still be *you* and you know that. It's empiric, it's part of observable Universe and any theory, simple or otherwise, would need to cope with that at some point.
Does it matter that any different past that I am able to imagine is still based ONLY on my collective experiences? I can imagine different paths that my life could have taken, but the results are still entirely limited by my imagination based on what I have seen and known. It is limited only to what I can describe using words from languages I speak, limited only to places I have seen (either in real life or in pictures/videos), and although I can choose to suspend logic, it's generally only following a sequence of possible events that I would expect it to follow based on my experience of how things follow one another.
In short, for me, there is no *you* that is any more than simply the sum of my life experiences. I also know that if I get a traumatic injury to the brain or a disease like Alzheimer's, I will be a completely different *you*, whereas your theory would suggest that the *you* will remain, because it transcends the physical body.
Can you explain why people with head injuries change personalities and become different *you* people? Or explain what the difference is between you, the brain physically wired to receive experiences and shape who you are, and the *you* that you are talking about? Because besides me having a brain with a differing collection of experiences, I don't get it, and don't see that difference as any more magical than, say, two different rivers that have different shapes and paths.
