It is strange that inner identity poses a problem while the identity of objects in the world apparently does not. The world of experience is held together, or synthesised, by some sort of ideal structure because the contents of experience are exclusively ideal entities, subjective components, and so what connects them must also be ideal, and hence potentially transparent. A feeling, a thought, even a pain are representations of some kind, they are objects of a consciousness. The pain may be insistent and overwhelming, but it can be momentarily forgotten when something else fills attention, or it can be damped and grow distant after a drug is administered - it all happens to you. Put in the crudest terms, experience is what fills the mind, and what fills the mind are ideas. You can't directly experience a stone, the stone itself is, as they say, noumenal. It comes to you via your senses which require a certain distance from their objects. Unlike things in the world, which are woven into a complex web of interrelations, which allows them to underpin each other, ideas are self-contained. Ideas link together loosely according to logical or associational categories, but first they need to be co-present to the same synthetic gaze. How it comes about that these ideal components of experience can be together in a shared field of experience is not obvious at all, and the fact they belong to the same physical brain and hence can share in the natural self-identity of physical things does not solve the problem. To take this line would be to surreptitiously dissolve the division between substrate and emergent, to use that jargon. Still, this question is very hard to formulate, the language is slippery and circles back on itself, is inherently question-begging. Is it a real question or not? The simplest way to resolve it is to do away with consciousness altogether. Bring down the Cartesian theatre and watch all the rest crumble, the famous qualia melt into air and so on and so on. Until a little voice asks, "for whom did you perform these feats? to whom does it matter?" and the whole thing starts over again.