I think that the experience of continuity is what makes these things entirely different.
It is the experience of continuity that satisfies my hard-wired desire for self-preservation.
It is the experience of continuity that satisfies my hard-wired desire for self-preservation.
Why is it that we feel like the same person after we wake up from sleep, from anesthesia, or even a prolonged coma? You could go to sleep, have arbitrary operations done to the neurons in your brain while asleep, and presumably will awake into the "same body".
This thought experiment leads me to believe that the most important consideration for mind-uploading is to ensure that the original body dies/is killed before bringing the copy online.
Still, the moment you move its dataset to a new device and deactivate the original, aren't you killing the original?
But if we believe consciousness is some subjective experience that results from the functioning brain or similar physical device, what can we say?
Think of a vinyl record and a digital music player. The vinyl record is playing along when it is stopped suddenly, the digital player is started at exactly the right time to produce no break in the song.
If you insist that you are the record player, then you die, you stopped. If you think that you are the song, it continued without missing a beat. Instead of an abrupt stop you can cross fade the record out and the digital one in over a few minutes. Does this make a difference?