If you use the concepts of “dying” or “personal identity” in this context, you risk committing the noncentral fallacy, since uploading is an atypical case of their application, and their standard properties won’t automatically carry over.
For example, concluding that an instance of you “actually dies” when there is also a recent copy doesn’t necessarily imply that something bad took place, since even if you do in some sense decide that this event is an example of the concept of “dying”, this is such an atypical example that its membership in that concept provides only very weak evidence for sharing the property of being bad with the more typical examples. Locating this example in the standard concepts is both difficult and useless, a wrong question.
The only way out seems to be to taboo the ideas of “dying”, “personal identity”, etc., and fall back on the arguments that show in what way typical dying is bad, and non-dying is good, by generalizing these arguments about badness of typical destruction of a person to badness of the less typical destruction of a copy, and goodness of not destroying a person to goodness of having a spare copy when another copy is destroyed.
It seems to me that the valuable things about a living person (we’ve tabooed the “essence of personal identity”, and are only talking about value) are all about their abstract properties, their mind, their algorithm of cognition, and not about the low-level details of how these abstract properties are implemented. Since destruction of a copied person preserves these properties (implemented in the copy), the value implemented by them is retained. Similarly, one of the bad things about typical dying (apart from the loss of a mind discussed above) seems to be the event of terminating a mind. To the extent this event is bad in itself, copying and later destroying the original will be bad. If this is so, destructive uploading will be better than uploading followed by destruction of the conscious original, but possibly worse than pure copying without any destruction.
If you use the concepts of “dying” or “personal identity” in this context, you risk committing the noncentral fallacy, since uploading is an atypical case of their application, and their standard properties won’t automatically carry over.
For example, concluding that an instance of you “actually dies” when there is also a recent copy doesn’t necessarily imply that something bad took place, since even if you do in some sense decide that this event is an example of the concept of “dying”, this is such an atypical example that its membership in that concept provides only very weak evidence for sharing the property of being bad with the more typical examples. Locating this example in the standard concepts is both difficult and useless, a wrong question.
The only way out seems to be to taboo the ideas of “dying”, “personal identity”, etc., and fall back on the arguments that show in what way typical dying is bad, and non-dying is good, by generalizing these arguments about badness of typical destruction of a person to badness of the less typical destruction of a copy, and goodness of not destroying a person to goodness of having a spare copy when another copy is destroyed.
It seems to me that the valuable things about a living person (we’ve tabooed the “essence of personal identity”, and are only talking about value) are all about their abstract properties, their mind, their algorithm of cognition, and not about the low-level details of how these abstract properties are implemented. Since destruction of a copied person preserves these properties (implemented in the copy), the value implemented by them is retained. Similarly, one of the bad things about typical dying (apart from the loss of a mind discussed above) seems to be the event of terminating a mind. To the extent this event is bad in itself, copying and later destroying the original will be bad. If this is so, destructive uploading will be better than uploading followed by destruction of the conscious original, but possibly worse than pure copying without any destruction.