It doesn't seem nuts, it just seems to miss the point, even ignoring souls. No matter how perfect the copy it'll still be a new instance, and the original meat brain instance of myself will one day fail and that consciousness will cease. A copy may fire up and it may be perfect could be a brand new "me", but the consciousness that is the running instance of me will be no more. There's no escape from that. I don't care about copies of myself running around, I'm not that egotistical to think the world needs more of me, but the eternal dark of death scares me, and duplication does nothing to assuage those fears.
This already happens to you every time you go to sleep and wake up. You have absolutely no way of discerning whether the consciousness you are now experiencing is a new consciousness created by your body when you woke up, or whether it is the same consciousness as before you went to sleep.
A body produces consciousness, consciousness does not 'inhabit' a body.
The eternal dark that I can't experience doesn't scare me, but I'd still like to have a backup — or at least, I did, then I started seriously considering what else can be done with those backups besides restoring from them…
I probably still would, but I'm much less optimistic about people than I used to be.
Backup of my brain. Lost two relatives to Alzheimer's, seems plausible that I might benefit from a freshly printed brain in 30 years, even if the scan, reprinting, and transplant are all done on the same day under general anaesthetic.
(Today such a thing is totally implausible; perhaps it still will be in 30 years, but I'll only find out by living until then).
I'm sure from your previous comment that you don't see that as a continuation of self, but I do see it as such.
Similar works for any potentially dangerous activity.
