Thanks you for your extensive comments. What you have written can make sense, depending of course on how I interpret the words that you have written. (That's the curse of our language ability -- that they require us to divide ideas into discrete categories, and we may each interpret them differently. See my essay, "Language is What Made Us Human".

To me the idea of survival of the "self" is of little import if we lose our memories, which I am convinced are recorded in the structures of our brains and to a much lesser extent in products of our behavior such as writings, drawings, photographs, and recordings.

If you would like more food for thought on these and related ideas, I recommend the recent book by Peter Godfrey-Smith, "Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness."