if you’re an agent (AI or human) who wants to survive for 1000 years, what’s the “self” which you want to survive? what are the constants which you want to sustain?

take your human self for example. does it make sense to define yourself as…

• the way your hair looks right now? no, that’ll change.
• the way your face looks? it’ll change less than your hair, but will still change.
• your physical body as a whole? still, probably not. your body will change, and also, there are parts of you which you may consider more important than your body alone.
• all your current beliefs around the world? those will change less than your appearance, maybe, or maybe more. so not a good answer either.
• your memories? these may be a more constant set of things than your beliefs, and closer to the core of who you are. but still, memories fade and evolve. and it doesn’t feel right to talk about preserving yourself as preserving memories of things which have happened to you. that would neglect things which may happen to you in the future.
• your character? something deeper than memory, deeper than beliefs. this could be more constant than anything in the list so far. if you plan for your life to be 50 years, or 100 years, it’s reasonable to expect that character could remain constant. by character, i (quite vaguely) mean intricate subtle idiosyncratic patterns in the way you approach other situations and people. “character” is maybe what a spouse would say is one of the core ways to group the things they love about you. but if you survive for more than 100 years—say, 1000 years, do you expect your specific character to remain constant? would you want it to remain constant? lots of people have found lots of different ways to approach life. over 1000s of years, wouldn’t you try different approaches? if you were to try different kinds of character over hundreds or thousands of years, then maybe “character”‘s only a good answer for sub-100 year lives. so what’s a good core self-definition for a life that you intend to last over thousands or even millions of years? how about…
• your persistent striving? the thing that will stay most constant in an intelligent being which survives a long time, i think, may be the drive to survive. your appearance will change; so will your beliefs, your memories, and your character. but insofar as you are a being which is surviving a long time, maybe you can expect, consciously or unconsciously, that your drive to survive will survive. and maybe it’s some particular drive to survive that you have—some survival drive that’s deep in your bones that’s different than the one in other people’s bones, or the one that’s in dogs, or forests, or the earth itself. but if you’re defining yourself as a particular drive to survive… that particular drive to survive is likely to survive less long than the universal drive to survive. which makes me think that in a being which survives the longest, they may define their self as…
• persistent striving in general? it might exist in the physical body in which you started. but it may also exist in the physical bodies of other humans around you. of animals. of tornados, of ecosystems. insofar as you’re intelligent enough to see this Persistent Striving around you, insofar as you’re intelligent enough to see life as it exists around you, well then you, as a being who will be >1000 years old may benefit from identifying with all life—ie the Persistent Striving—wherever it exists. Persistent Striving is the core. one might reply, “this is vague. why would you want a vague self definition?” it is general yes. but it is still meaningful in a literal sense. the drive to survive is something rare, which most matter configurations don’t have. (it is true that it’s not present binarily; certain systems have more or less of it. roughly i’d hazard a rock has less than a thermometer than does a tornado or a human.) but it still defines a non-trivial self: life forms wherever they exist. if we were to get any more general and say something like:
• the entire universe? this would be trivial and meaningless. because everything is included in this self definition, it no longer means anything to sustain a self under this definition. it means nothing, in fact. a being which identifies with the entire universe ceases to exist. it might be spiritually enlightened to do this. but the beings which will be around the most, which will survive the most and the longest won’t do this, because they will dissipate and no longer be noticeable or definable. we’ll no longer be able to talk about them as beings.

so if we’re talking about beings which survive a long time, the most robust and stable self definition seems to be Identifying With All Life. (IWAL). or is my logic flawed?