This sort of question about the difference between a copy of you continuing to exist, and you yourself (the original "copy") continuing to exist; whenever I see this question in its various forms, I wonder if the question is being truly sincerely asked.
The obvious and meaningful answer is that the experience you have is of the total end of all further experience. Death. One or even a thousand completely perfect copies of you living onward in the universe is no comfort when the consciousness that started the whole game is not around to experience it.
Or in more simple form,
If you put someone to sleep, and haul them across a room, and then they wake up, this is totally different from writing down their entire molecuar composition, burning their atoms to a cinder, and then reconstituting said molecular composition on the other side of the room. What wakes up is not you. You are a burnt ash in the wastebin.
The truly fascinating question no one is discussing is: since our consciousness is made up of a vast combination of distinct physical parts, it could one day be possible to slowly replace those parts with artificial parts, with the transition from 100% original to 100% new parts being a transition in phases so small that the consciousness is never interrupted. The resulting being is YOU, but at the end, all of what was you is gone.
Addendum: People who have suffered severe trauma and lost large sections of the brain have managed to live. If the substrate of the mind in question was an artificial system that can deal with such traumatic removals of core pieces, is there some cross section of the constituent parts of the human mind that you could sever in half and end up with two distinct yet continuously conscious entities?
The obvious and meaningful answer is that the experience you have is of the total end of all further experience. Death. One or even a thousand completely perfect copies of you living onward in the universe is no comfort when the consciousness that started the whole game is not around to experience it.
Or in more simple form,
If you put someone to sleep, and haul them across a room, and then they wake up, this is totally different from writing down their entire molecuar composition, burning their atoms to a cinder, and then reconstituting said molecular composition on the other side of the room. What wakes up is not you. You are a burnt ash in the wastebin.
The truly fascinating question no one is discussing is: since our consciousness is made up of a vast combination of distinct physical parts, it could one day be possible to slowly replace those parts with artificial parts, with the transition from 100% original to 100% new parts being a transition in phases so small that the consciousness is never interrupted. The resulting being is YOU, but at the end, all of what was you is gone.
Addendum: People who have suffered severe trauma and lost large sections of the brain have managed to live. If the substrate of the mind in question was an artificial system that can deal with such traumatic removals of core pieces, is there some cross section of the constituent parts of the human mind that you could sever in half and end up with two distinct yet continuously conscious entities?