Again, 'transfer their consciousness' means 'die, but somewhere a machine remembers what it was like to be you'. Like an animated, responsive epitaph on your gravestone. Still, you die.
It's not a foregone conclusion that with sufficiently exotic technology you can't transfer your mind from the form of a human brain to that of some synthetic thing, all without disrupting your phenomenal experience.
However, if you can do that, it also seems like you could split your consciousness in two, while making the transition seamless for each. In effect, not just a copy of your 'mind' but a copy of your 'self'. I'm not sure what to make of that.
You're not being imaginative enough. 'Mind uploading' need not be some passive process that merely copies the current state of your brain and runs it in an emulator somewhere.
You could, for example, hook your brain up to some machine which would replace parts of it, bit by bit, bringing that functionality into an emulator 'gradually', while creating an interface with the still-physical parts of the brain such that the thing functions the same as the physical brain did before, only with part of it still using the old hardware, and the other part running in the emulator. Continue this process until the entire brain - and perhaps even the entire nervous system or body - has been brought into the emulator. Now you're virtualized.
It's obviously extremely speculative, but all the same I can't find any point in a process like this, where your phenomenal consciousness would be disrupted.
So you die gradually? Hard to say. But looking just at the body, I see it degrading functionality and sliding, like senility, into a non-functional state. Dead.
