As a fellow reader of IAASL I see what you mean. I think IAASL lost me at the end because it was repurposing terms like "soul" and "self" in ways that were no longer really philosophically robust, but I understood and appreciated it as effectively memorializing a lost partner, and gave clear expression to what it means to treat the things a person leaves behind, and the desire to preserve them, as a way of keeping your connection to them.

And it doesn't diminish how fantastic the rest of the book us up to that point. In the age of almost-AGI and renewed debates on consciousness we need the likes of Hofstadter more than ever.