I see your point, but I guess my problem is that I don't see why constructing these tradeoffs is productive in the first place. It just seems like a party game where people ask what you'd do for a million dollars.

Like, in the situation here, with uploading, why does immortality even need to be part of equation? All he's really saying is "intuitively, it doesn't seem like an upload would 'really' be me". What happens to the upload, and what happens to the original, is just a carnival of distractions anyway. We can easily swap them around and see that they have no bearing on the issue.

In the last meetup I went to, there was an obnoxious guy who was dominating the conversation, and somehow got into a relativism-based defense of something, I think just to be contrary.

Several other people jumped on him at this point, and soon the argument swung around to "what about torture? what if you were being tortured?" and he came up with rationalizations about how what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, it'd be a great story, etc. etc., and so they kept piling on qualifications, saying "they torture you for 50 years and then execute you and you have no hope of rescue and blah blah blah", trying to nail down boards over every possible ray of sunshine.

And of course even then, rationalizations were found, and his girlfriend took up the contrarian standard and soliloquized about how she was a survivor of a suicide attempt and believed it was always better to choose life, no matter how painful, and the other participants responded by cranking up the torture even further.

Did anything remotely productive come out of this? No, of course not. It was ugly, it was pointless, and frankly it was embarrassing to be a part of. I left.

I question whether I'm the screwed up one for not swallowing my alienation to this kind of behavior.