You're still not getting it. "Entity", "survival", these are still arbitrary or circularly defined terms. You decided what an entity is (i.e where one thing ends and a different thing begins) and what the essence which "survives" is (i.e. why it's a big deal whether there's a different chunk of nucleic acids similar but not identical to my own floating around 200 years from now).

These ideas are not wrong, but they are teleological. They are about the purpose of things. And nature doesn't come with purposes, it's all something we impose on it.