I recently realized that a couple of problems that I've been thinking over (the nature of selfishness and the nature of pain/pleasure/suffering/happiness) can be considered instances of ontological crises in humans (although I'm not so sure we necessarily have the cognitive algorithms to solve them).

Uploading also seems like it's going to spawn a whole lot of ontological crises in humans. Suppose you value equality and want to weigh everyone's views equally, either via an ordinary democratic process or something more exotic like CEV. So what do you do when somebody can make a huge number of copies of themselves, does each of get them equal weight? How do you weigh the values of two minds that have merged together? Or even without uploading, if you happen to think that "alters" in dissociative identity disorder were genuine entities, should their desires be counted separately?

A lot of modern-day values seem to be premised on the assumption that human minds are indivisible, uncopyable and unmergeable - if you discard those assumptions, translating our values into something meaningful becomes really hard. To say nothing about what "death" or "personal identity" means when minds can be copied and deleted...