If people can be convinced that their simulated virtual self is actually them, overpopulation will be solved by mass suicide. Sorry if that's too dark for you guys, it just has to be said. All these "live inside a computer people" are just a modern Jim Jones cult.

A self-backup from pattern data isn't any good for soothing one's metaphysical fears, unless (like most of the people on Star Trek) you don't think that the disintegration of all the molecules in one's body is the disintegration of oneself. A backup self is perfectly adequate if you want certain things to be taken care of despite one's death.

I believe that if I die I'm dead, backup or no, but I'd like to have a backup anyway so it could continue to pursue the research I found interesting while alive and could continue to take care of my family just as I would. The dead-me won't care either way but present-me would like to make contingency plans for the future.

A copy of you is you. Literally the atoms that make up 'you' are replaced all the time, by biology. And the atoms themselves aren't real. Like some models of physics suggest that physical things are constantly being copied and deleted already, like how objects in a cellular automaton universe are "destroyed" every time they move.

But how the universe actually works is irrelevant even. Other people can have a different definition of 'death'. If the information in my brain is preserved then that's all that matters to me. If I had to get my neurons replaced, one at a time, with 'artificial neurons' that would contain all the same information, then i would do it. Surely you would to. And you wouldn't even notice any change I bet. It wouldn't change anything observable at all. So how can it possibly matter?

Whether or not simulations are actually the people they're copies of, or people at all, is irrelevant to the question Hanson is looking at, which is "What might we expect ems to do?".