[mannykannot]

"So if we hooked up two people’s brains together in year 2050, would they feel like a single person?...We won’t know until we actually try it. If the answer is no then the rest of this blog post is completely irrelevant..." My guess is that if this were done to people who, up to that point, had lived independent lives (i.e. not born conjoined at the brain), they would each feel like individuals who had suffered some sort of major stroke, rather than that they had become a single person.

With regard to the cloning phase of your argument, is this not effectively the same as what the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics says happens all the time? FWIW, while I don't feel as if those other versions of me are me (assuming many-worlds is true), I realize that I am in no position to assert that I am the 'real' me, and in fact that it is beside the point to ask which one is.