I'm hoping for mind uploading... my body sucks, I crave the power of bits
I often think about this in the concept of teleporters from Star Trek. When they beam the away team down did they really send those people somewhere or just incinerate them and create clones in another place?
What if the scanner is able to scan you without destroying the original body? What if you accidentally arrive in two destinations? etc...
* Another fascinating question is, we'll assume the new body will be just as conscious as you were. Where does its consciousness "come" from? From its point of view, it was in the teleporter on Earth one moment, and on Mars the next!
I thought the video game SOMA did a nice job exploring this area.
When someone dies where does the consciousness go?
I don’t think there’s any law of conservation of consciousness.
So it is staggered in general.
If someone said that we Officially (TM) become a different person when we sleep and wake up, no one would care.
On the other hand, we would really care about cloning because all sorts of things assume it to be impossible and it would all be a huge mess in practice. Not because the identities got tangled, but because as a consequence we don't know how to jail someone who created a clone a year ago, for example.
In star trek I believe it does full matter to energy conversion and back again. I'm not entirely sure how piecewise motion of said energy is accomplished.
They form a feedback loop of input with your brain, the conscious side of which you are aware of, and the unconscious side oprating silently in the background.
What do you think will happen if you deprive your brain of these inputs? Yes your conscious mind might cope, but your unconscious mind might go berserk, and start spamming hidden error messages to your conscious which might manifest in many unpredictable ways.
The Human Connectome Project might interest you. It is the closest thing we have to this right now.
Also the Open Worm project. We have successfuly uploaded nematodes (by countless dissections and microscopically mapping the neuron/axon connections).
This doesn't even take into account of the fact that even if you were to meticulously plan every single bit of your life, your body can just betray you out of spite (I fear testicular torsion every day.)