> I still do not think that the patient will experience being uploaded into a computer
Creating a copy is like having a Siamese twin you didn't know about, because it was sharing 100% of your body and mind. But with the copy you are split apart for the first time.
If you are being uploaded at the time of the split, then one of you experiences the seamless first-person transformation into digital form. The other you stays biologic and dies, immediately or eventually depending on the procedure.
The irresistible urge is to mope that "you" are the biologic one, the one that dies. But this isn't true, you really are both. The one that became digital is you in every sense, it woke up in your shoes, it took your date to the prom, it has your personality, it will make the decision you would make going forward.
If you think the copy is inferior or inconsequential by virtue of not being the original, then consider what if we right now are all copies? Would our lives and first-person experiences be less genuine and less valuable if it was revealed there the true original versions of us existed elsewhere? In an upload scenario the copy is you.
But why bother? Unless you really think the world is worse off without you and your contributions, why would you participate in a service like this? It's not going to do you any good or let you live a day longer. Your copy will go on having a perfectly happy life being the new you, but why should any of us be excited about that?
You're discounting the experience of the copy and identifying solely with the original biological human. Instead you have to really internalize that both experiences are equally yours.
That said, I wouldn't get excited about it. Uploading is a bald afterlife myth with the same capacity to beguile as the religious versions. Better to focus on the here and now.
I may as well internalize that Warren Buffett's experiences are equally mine, or a strain of bacteria. If we're not defining "self" through any real continuity and instead just making it an arbitrary label, there's no reason everybody can't be me. It becomes a bit meaningless.
Sleep and anesthesia break continuity, as has be reported elsewhere in this thread, so self is not about moment to moment continuity.
The reason your copy is equally you vs. Warren Buffet is that your copy shared every molecule in your body and every thought in your head for your entire life up until the moment of splitting off.
Let's imagine you run the simulation when you are still alive. Are both copies you? Wouldn't each copy believe it's a full consciousness and not half a consciousness?
Assume you do a regular (or even automatic and continuous) sync between the copies. Which copy would you prefer survived, if one of them were to die?
Both copies would claim to be you, and would have equal right to that claim. Yet each copy would be a fully conscious person and would immediately diverge into its own individual from the shared point on.
This of course sounds like a contradiction, both are you and both are individuals? That's because our language and concepts just don't have the muscle for this situation. "Both are you" is short-hand since the wold "you" becomes ill-defined or at least radically transformed. Consider Hofstadter's "twin world" concept from his "I am a Strange Loop" for how a single "individual" could really be made up of multiple individuals.
From an objective point of a view it's much better if the digital version survives, because we're assuming the biological original has a shorter life span.
You avoided the question, what would you prefer? There would exist two (or n) instances of you, with a shared history, but no shared present. Maybe you posit the question is moot because the concept of you dilutes at the point where a copy is made? I can't imagine how it would dilute enough for the physical you change its self-preservation instinct, though.
On the other hand, I'm not so sure that the digital version is preferrable, there are lots of maladies that would be trivial on digital versions, for example destroying the being, controlling it and altering in any way. All that stuff is (so far) harder on the biological world.
(PS: Thanks for the Hofstadter pointer, I stopped following him at The Mind's I)
I don't like "would you kill X or Y" questions. For one details matter, and we have no details. For two it's just impossible to say sitting here in my comfy chair how I would react in some dire life-or-death situation.
Creating a copy is like having a Siamese twin you didn't know about, because it was sharing 100% of your body and mind. But with the copy you are split apart for the first time.
If you are being uploaded at the time of the split, then one of you experiences the seamless first-person transformation into digital form. The other you stays biologic and dies, immediately or eventually depending on the procedure.
The irresistible urge is to mope that "you" are the biologic one, the one that dies. But this isn't true, you really are both. The one that became digital is you in every sense, it woke up in your shoes, it took your date to the prom, it has your personality, it will make the decision you would make going forward.
If you think the copy is inferior or inconsequential by virtue of not being the original, then consider what if we right now are all copies? Would our lives and first-person experiences be less genuine and less valuable if it was revealed there the true original versions of us existed elsewhere? In an upload scenario the copy is you.