[antepodius]

Make yourself intra-universally interesting enough that the alien construction management AI might instantiate a simulation of you from the cached info at some point. It's a strange sort of Darwinism, but it's all we've got.

[gubby]

An instantiation of me from a backup, however accurate, would be no use to my sense of having survived as I would have ceased to exist and not even be aware of the copy.

[antepodius]

That's fine! People with your philosophy of self will just cease to exist, as they presumably will refuse to optimize for likelihood of being simulated, and those with a more permissive notion of self-identity will be the ones willing to adapt to the hellish computational circumstances.

(Of course, you could say that everyone's ceasing to exist, here, because your rules of what counts as a person and what's their copy applies to everyone. But please realize that, from the point of view of those who think having a copy survive is better than all of them dying, and is partial survival in some sense, that being simulated is a form of winning, even if you think both the person and the copy are deluding themselves.)

(Though I do wonder how you go about the day without having a nervous breakdown, given that your evolving state is probably quantized, or at least sliceable, meaning there's no great physical difference between your pattern shifting from one [smallfractionofa]second to the next, destroying the old one and replacing it with a new one, and your old pattern being destroyed and replaced somewhere else. It's not like your past self is aware of your future copy in normal life, either!)

(I'm not saying you're wrong; just that the situation is a lot worse than you think it is, and that we should all be living (and repeatedly dying) in absolute existential terror.)

[__MatrixMan__]

If you haven't read Greg Egan's "Permutation City," it seems it might be right up your alley.

[Joeri]

For an exploration of the perception of self by a digital copy I can recommend The Old Axolotl by Jacek Dukaj.

[ajuc]

Have you read it in English? Dukaj is my favorite modern sci-fi author and I'm wondering how well he's translated.

[throw1234651234]

I wonder if that's the case with "putting people on ice" if they ever manage to revive them.

Of course, one could argue that me having a past is a complete illusion anyway, as I am just some atoms.

[thelittleone]

Perhaps we are an instance created by an alien construction management AI that is wondering if we will become self aware before the timeout.