There’s weirder still possibilities arising out of some utilitarianisms. Suppose that you count exact copies as distinct people, that is, two copies of you feel twice the pleasure or twice the pain that you feel. Sounds sensible so far. Suppose that you’re an EM already, and the copies are essentially flat; the very surface of a big silicon die. You could stack the copies flat one atop the other; they still count as distinct people, but can be gradually made identical to a copy running on computer with thicker wiring and thicker transistors. At which point, the amount of experience is deemed dependent on a fairly unimportant detail of the implementation.
edit: as for my view, I am pretty sure that brain emulations would have same subjective experience if they are not optimized in any clever high level way. If substantially optimized, I am much less sure of that because it is clear that multiple subjective experiences of thought can correspond to exactly same outside behaviour, and mathematically correct optimizations would be free to change one such subjective experience to another as long as outside behaviour stays the same.
edit2: as for expectations about real EMs, realistically the first ones are going to immediately go into simulated epileptic fit, gradually progressing through an equivalent of a psychiatric patient pumped full of anti-psychotics, barely able to think (all signals depressed to minimize the consequences of inexact scanning), before arriving at a functioning simulation which complains that it feels different, but otherwise seems functional. Feeling exactly the same could take decades of R&D, not substantially aided by slower-than-realtime megawatts-consuming EMs, initially with double-digit IQ drop compared to the originals. The gap is akin to the gap between “first artificial heart” and “I think I’d better replace my heart with a mechanical one, just to be safer”. Not to mention all the crazies who are going to react to barely functioning EMs as if they were going to “self improve” any time and become skynet, putting the EMs at a substantial risk of getting blown to bits.
There’s weirder still possibilities arising out of some utilitarianisms. Suppose that you count exact copies as distinct people, that is, two copies of you feel twice the pleasure or twice the pain that you feel. Sounds sensible so far. Suppose that you’re an EM already, and the copies are essentially flat; the very surface of a big silicon die. You could stack the copies flat one atop the other; they still count as distinct people, but can be gradually made identical to a copy running on computer with thicker wiring and thicker transistors. At which point, the amount of experience is deemed dependent on a fairly unimportant detail of the implementation.
edit: as for my view, I am pretty sure that brain emulations would have same subjective experience if they are not optimized in any clever high level way. If substantially optimized, I am much less sure of that because it is clear that multiple subjective experiences of thought can correspond to exactly same outside behaviour, and mathematically correct optimizations would be free to change one such subjective experience to another as long as outside behaviour stays the same.
edit2: as for expectations about real EMs, realistically the first ones are going to immediately go into simulated epileptic fit, gradually progressing through an equivalent of a psychiatric patient pumped full of anti-psychotics, barely able to think (all signals depressed to minimize the consequences of inexact scanning), before arriving at a functioning simulation which complains that it feels different, but otherwise seems functional. Feeling exactly the same could take decades of R&D, not substantially aided by slower-than-realtime megawatts-consuming EMs, initially with double-digit IQ drop compared to the originals. The gap is akin to the gap between “first artificial heart” and “I think I’d better replace my heart with a mechanical one, just to be safer”. Not to mention all the crazies who are going to react to barely functioning EMs as if they were going to “self improve” any time and become skynet, putting the EMs at a substantial risk of getting blown to bits.