You're right, it's infeasible to care about individual memes (or for that matter, the vast majority of individual animals) the way we care about other humans. I don't have an answer to your question, I'm trying to break a logjam of humancentric ethical thinking.

Forgive me for passing on my confusion here, but I'm not certain that consciousness/sentience, is anything more than 'recognizably human'. You and I have a common brain architecture and one of our faculties is picking that out from trees and rocks. Perhaps there are plenty of evolved, competent alien minds that would pose a challenge to our ape-like-me recognition systems simply because they're so alien.

But if and when humans upload, then they will become effectively memes. We need to solve the question of how to care about non-sentient life, because a datafile could be you or me or a descendent.