> A terminal patient choosing brain preservation with the hope of future revival via mind uploading is making the same type of rational judgement –faced with the alternative of oblivion I choose to undergo an uncertain surgical procedure that has some chance of restoring most of the unique memories that I consider to define ‘me’ as an individual. Hopefully this makes clear that I am rejecting a ‘magical’ view of the self. An individual’s mind is computational and, just like with a laptop, an imperfect backup copy is better than complete erasure.

Doesn't this argue against the entire brain preservation enterprise? That is, without a "magical" view of selfhood, why attempt to preserve a partially faithful replica of one's self instead of finding other ways to do the things that you'd want to do in the future once revived?

I don't really back up my laptop in a conventional sense. I do git pushes of my git clones, I copy some files to rsync.net, I do a lot of work on cloud services like Google Docs and Trello, etc. A lot of what's on my laptop is transient. This is nice, because I'm not backing up a Mac; if I decide to run Debian or switch to a Chromebook or whatever, I can still achieve my high-level goal of not losing work without the low-level implementation of restoring a Mac. And certainly I don't back up servers at work in the conventional sense, either; most of those "servers" are now just Kubernetes pods anyway, represented declaratively, and that's a lot better than a backup.

I think in the same sense, I do have a plan for immortality, and that plan is to change the world for the better while I am alive, now, as conventionally defined, in lasting ways. I don't really know what I would do if I were resurrected many centuries in the future. (I would expect at least as much change in the world as between now and many centuries in the past, and I can't really imagine even the greatest thinkers or doers or heroes of ages past productively helping the world today. Should Arthur return from Avalon to save Britain today, he'd have a lot of trouble recovering the throne in a largely pro-democratic society, and he'd have no idea what to make of "Brexit.")

Meanwhile, there's quite a bit I can do today to improve the world, to improve the lives of others, to try to improve by a fraction of a percent the chances of human society even existing a few centuries hence, etc. My self - my life and physical conscious existence - is just a tool for accomplishing whatever goals I have; it's not the goal itself. My laptop is also a tool; if I can keep doing the work that was on my laptop, I don't need a clone of the laptop itself.

It seems to me, then, that the only argument for brain preservation - for attempting to preserve one's "self" into the future and for investing in the ability to make it happen - is seeing one's self in this "magical" way, in believing that there's more value in the very fact of one's existence, and in fact even a partial and inaccurate continuation of that existence - than in what you do with that existence.

(And it does not save you from having to influence the world and engineer its future. At the least, as we can see, you have to spend a fair amount of your life today convincing society that it should develop in a way so that, in the future, they build the means to restore you.)