If you undergo dementia or some other neuro-degenerative condition for a few years, it will turn you into a very different person. A "rough" copy made from information mined from the internet could perhaps be much closer than this to the healthy version of the person than the version kept alive in a nursing home in their later years. Because of this argument, I don't see how you can come to the conclusion that identifying with a "caricature" is cargo-cult by definition.
Your corpse is definitely not an atomically precise copy of yourself. Corpses are the subject of extensive structural damage which makes their state of unconsciousness irreversible. If this were not the case, we would neither call them corpses nor consider it unreasonable to identify with them.
A more interesting grey area would be if you were subjected to cryonics or plastination, copied while in a completely ametabolic and unconscious state, and then reanimated. You could look across at a plastic-embedded or frozen copy of yourself and not even know if they are the original. In fact, there could be many of them, implying that you are probably not the original unless you can obtain information otherwise.
If you value your original self sufficiently, that seems to imply that if say you wake up in a room with 99 other versions of you still in stasis and have a choice to a) destroy them all and live or b) suicide and reanimate them all, you should pick suicide in advance so that it becomes 99% likely your copy will pick that option.
On the other hand if you don't care whether you are the original or a copy you can destroy all those nonsentient copies (99% chance of including the original) without worrying about it.
I heard that women are difficult to convince when it comes to signing up for cryo. In mentioning cryonics to a dying person, there seems to be a consensus that it's not going to happen. I encountered a post: Years saved: Cryonics vs VillageReach, which addressed my main objection (that the amount of money spent on cryo may be better spent on saving starving children, especially considering that you could save multiple children for that amount of money with high probability whereas you save only one life with low probability by paying for cryo). Now I'm open to being persuaded.
My first instinct was to go read a lot about cryo, but it dawned on me that there are a lot of people here who will want to convince family members, some of them female, to sign up - and these people may appreciate the opportunity to practice on somebody. It has been argued that "Brilliant and creative minds have explored the argument territory quite thoroughly." but if we already know all of the objections and have working rebuttals for each, why is it still thought of as extra difficult to get through to women? If there were a solution to this, it would not be seen as difficult. There must be something that pro-cryo people need for persuading women that they either haven't figured out or aren't good enough at yet.
So, I decided to offer myself for experiments in attempting to convince a woman to sign up for cryo and took a poll in an open thread to see whether there was interest. I don't claim to be perfectly representative of the female population, but I assume that I will have at least some objections in common with them and that persuading me would still be good practice for anyone planning to convince family members in the future. Having a study on persuading women would be more scientific but how do you come up with hypotheses to test for such a study if you have no actual experience persuading women?
So, here is your opportunity to try whatever methods of persuasion you feel like with no guilt, explore my full list of objections without worrying about it being socially awkward, (I will even share cached religious thoughts, as annoyed as I am that I still have them.), and I will document as many of my impressions and objections as I can before I forget them.
I am putting each objection / impression into a new comment for organization. Also, I have decided to avoid reading anything further on cryo, until/unless it is suggested by one of my persuaders.
Well, have fun getting inside my head.