[maaku]

I agree. But the further implication is that for the same reasons, if your brain is plasticised and later scanned and turned into an uploaded whole-brain emulation, you'd still be dead. Uploading is not a pathway to personal longevity, or whatever you want to call continuation-of-me-not-just-my-memories.

[JoeAltmaier]

That's the crux of it all, isn't it? Is your self any more than your personality and memories? If so, then you'll have to resort to a soul or some such. If not, then the upload is really 'you', or a copy anyway.

And who's to say a soul wouldn't attach to a copy anyway? Souls are not that well understood. Perhaps it would be fooled by the copy, or have an affinity for it, or some such. As long as we're speculating.

[maaku]

No, there are plenty of perfectly reasonable physical theories for the nature of consciousness that don't equate identity with memories and don't involve souls. There's no reason to resort to dualism.

For example, there is the identity-is-the-instance-of-computation theory which says that it is not the information being computed (memories) that is relevant, but the computation itself.

[JoeAltmaier]

Agreed, the hardware/wetware is just as important as the bits being uploaded. Especially for chemical brains that store much of personality as neural wiring.

But lets say that's uploaded as well, as part of the 'program' details. Then where are we? An 'instance' of this is not actionably different from any other, if it behaves exactly the same. Its arguable that they are the 'same person' in some sense.

[maaku]

It matters to the person who is now dead and not living on in the machine.

[JoeAltmaier]

But they are living on! Kind of. Like you are, in that body of yours, once all the cells are replaced by new cells every decade or so. Its ok; you still sound like the same person.

[maaku]

Another strawman. No one is claiming that identity is tied to the molecules that make up the body, even in aggregate. There's a sense in which a car remains the same car even after continuing comprehensive maintenance has replaced every single part, but that car stays different from the next car off the production line. Does that example make sense?