I can understand why creating a reconstruction of a frozen brain might still be considered ‘you’. But what happens if multiple versions of ‘you’ are created? Are they all still ‘you’? If I create 4 reconstructions of a brain and put them in four different bodies, punching one in the arm will not create nerve impulses in the other three. And the punched brain will begin to think different thoughts (‘who is this jerk punching me?’).
In that case, all 4 brains started as ‘you’, but will not experience the same subsequent thoughts, and will be as disconnected from each other as identical twins.
This is basically the first Parfit example, which I note you don’t actually address. Is the ‘you’ on mars the same as ‘you’ on Earth? And what exactly does that mean if the ‘you’ on earth doesn’t get to experience the other one’s sensations first hand? Why should I care chat happens to him/me?
I can think of a few reasons why you would do this, although I’m not sure which one you had in mind.
Primarily, it’s to evaluate the extent to which we commenters accept what you say on face value, particularly when we’re not well informed to begin with. I don’t mean picking at the specifics of examples, but whether we’re evaluating what you’re saying for internal consistency between posts.
For instance, the ‘many worlds’ argument you’ve presented DOES seem more plausible that collapse, but it certainly still seems mysterious. Having universes sprouting in all directions is bad enough, but something like ‘mangled worlds’ whereby there are arbitrary cutoffs that make a world disappear is even worse. It may be an improvement, but it sure doesn’t feel like the final word, even though it’s presented as such.
I think this in part gets to the heart of why the mistake was unspotted for so long. Because Bohr and Shrodinger and the rest said that collapse was what was going on, and people tend to take these things on face value. Who wants to be the first guy to publicly disagree with Bohr? We didn’t have 30 years of physicists forming bad judgments, we had a couple of early physicists with bad judgments and 30 years of people taking their word on face value because they didn’t understand the problem exactly themselves.