Here's a thought experiment:

Let's say evil sadistic scientists kidnap you, bring you into their laboratory, and give you two options:

A: they incinerate your brain.

OR

B: they selectively destroy almost all of the neurons in your brain associated with memories and somehow create new connections to create different memories.

Which option would you choose?

If you see any reason to choose option B over option A, then it would seem to me that you don't really buy into "pattern identity theory" because pattern identity theory would suggest that you have effectively died in scenario B just as much as scenario A. The pattern of you from just before the operation has just had a discontinuously abrupt end.

Yet, I would still choose option B because I would still anticipate waking up as something or somebody that next morning, even if it were someone with a completely different set of memories, preferences, and sense of self, and surely that would be better than death. (Perhaps the evil scientists could even be so kind as to implant happier memories and healthier preferences in my new self).

Is this anticipation correct? I don't see how it could be wrong. Our memories change a little bit each night during sleep, and still we don't NOT wake up as at least someone (a slightly different person than the night before). I fail to see how the magnitude and/or rapidity of the change in memory could produce a qualitative difference in this regard. If it could, then where would the cut-off line be? How much would someone have to change my memories so that I effectively did not wake up the next morning as someone?

Note that this discussion is not just academic. It would determine one's decision to use a teleporter (especially if it was, let's say, a "1st generation" teleporter that still had some kinks in it and didn't quite produce a 100% high-fidelity copy at the other end). Would such a 99% accurate teleporter be a suicide machine, or would your subjective experience continue at the other end?

In any case, pattern identity theory (which says the continuation of my subjective experience is attached to a continuation of a particular pattern of information) seems out the window for me.

Nor does some sort of "physical identity theory" (that posits that the continuation of my subjective experience is attached to the continuation of a particular set of atoms) make any sense because of how patently false that is. (Atoms are constantly getting shuffled out of our brains all the time).

Nor does some sort of "dualism" (that posits that the continuation of my subjective experience is attached to some sort of metaphysical "soul") make any sense to me.

So at this point, I have no idea about under what conditions I will continue to have subjective experiences of some sort. Back to the drawing board....