the true purpose of mind uploading

Mind uploading is a very useful hypothetical technology, but not in the way most commonly cited and argued over.
We are used to thinking about mind uploading in terms of a possible escape from mortality. Is your body ageing and dying? No problem! Just transfer your memories and personality to a new substrate and get on with your life. As has been pointed out many times before, this solution to evading death throws many a nagging question, not least of which is ‘if my memories and personality are copied several times, how can several people all be me?.
Clearly, mind uploading stretches our concepts of self and individuality to breaking point and maybe we ought not to consider it a surefire means for the individual to escape their own death?
So what useful purpose could mind uploading serve?
It is the ultimate storytelling technology. There have been many attempts to classify the human species and one classification I am fond of is ‘the storytelling animal’. All cultures, throughout all history people have enriched and informed their lives by creating imaginary places, people and events. From oral narratives to novels to movies to videogames, human history cannot be properly understood unless one incorporates into that history the many forms of fictional narrative that have existed throughout the ages, and continue to be interwoven in all our lives. 
For most of history, these fictional worlds and people have been purely imaginary- dependent on humans’ active imagination to bring them to life. Absent of a human reader, a novel is nothing but meaningless rows of symbols. Without a human viewer, a film is nothing but meaningless patterns of light. But with computer games we took the first tiny steps toward fictional worlds that can work independently of human observers. This is because, unlike books, computers do not just statically store information, they actively process it. Thus, NPCs can live independent lives, going about their simple routines even when no human is watching.
Now, current NPCs are not at all convincingly conscious, and this is not at all surprising when you consider how much of the architecture of the human brain is missing in even our most complex neural models. But one day we may be able to quickly and easily scan brains and construct highly accurate emulations. Games like No Man’s Sky or online worlds like Second Life could then be populated by highly sophisticated beings. Of course, such fictional worlds need not be isolated from the physical world. Thanks to advances in augmented reality and robotics and VR, we could have some seamless integrations of the virtual with the physical and vice versa. Those children of our imaginations, the Harry Potters, the Buddhas, myself, we would be freed from total dependence on human imagination for our existence and could embark on the great adventure of taking charge of our own narratives, be responsible for our own history.
That is the true purpose of Mind Uploading.