So, if you decide that your brain after being shot is still you and then shoot yourself, you will not die?
Yes. In fact, this isn't hypothetical; lots of people on this site in fact do believe that their brains after they've been shot, if adequately cryopreserved, are still them and that they haven't necessarily died.
Can I decide I'm Bill Gates? Like, for a couple of days?
I don't know, can you? Have you tried? (Of course, that won't alter what the legal system does.)
I don't know, can you? Have you tried?
Yeah, it's not working, If I was Bill Gates, I'd be in a different body and location.
Scott Aaronson has a new 85 page essay up, titled "The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine". (Abstract here.) In Section 2.11 (Singulatarianism) he explicitly mentions Eliezer as an influence. But that's just a starting point, and he then moves in a direction that's very far from any kind of LW consensus. Among other things, he suggests that a crucial qualitative difference between a person and a digital upload is that the laws of physics prohibit making perfect copies of a person. Personally, I find the arguments completely unconvincing, but Aaronson is always thought-provoking and fun to read, and this is a good excuse to read about things like (I quote the abstract) "the No-Cloning Theorem, the measurement problem, decoherence, chaos, the arrow of time, the holographic principle, Newcomb's paradox, Boltzmann brains, algorithmic information theory, and the Common Prior Assumption". This is not just a shopping list of buzzwords, these are all important components of the author's main argument. It unfortunately still seems weak to me, but the time spent reading it is not wasted at all.