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MockTurtle comments on Your transhuman copy is of questionable value to your meat self. - Less Wrong Discussion
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I see the pattern identity theory, where uploads make sense, as one that takes it as a starting point that you have an unambiguous past but no unambiguous future. You have moments of consciousness where you remember your past, which gives you identity, and lets you associate your past moments of consciousness to your current one. But there's no way, objective or subjective, to associate your present moment of consciousness to a specific future moment of consciousness, if there are multiple such moments, such as a high-fidelity upload and the original person, who remember the same past identity equally well. A continuity identity theorist thinks that a person who gets uploaded and then dies is dead. A pattern identity theorist thinks that people die in that sense several times a second and have just gotten used to it. There are physical processes that correspond to moments of consciousness, but there's no physical process for linking two consecutive moments of consciousness as the same consciousness, other than regular old long and short term memories.
There's no question that the upload and the original will diverge. If I have a non-destructive upload done on me, I expect to get up from the upload couch, not wake up in the matrix, old habits and all that. And there is going to be a future me who will experience exactly that. But if the upload was successful, there's also going to be a future me who will be very surprised to wake up staring at some fluorescent polygons, having expected to wake up on the upload coach. This is where the "no unambiguous future selves" stops being sophistry and starts paying rent for the pattern identity theorist. "Which one is the real me" is a meaningless question. All we have to go with are memories, and both of me will have my memories.
If you want to argue a pattern identity theorist out of it, you'll want to argue why there has to necessarily be more than just memory going on with producing the sense of moment-to-moment personal continuity, and why the physically unconnected moments of consciousness model can't be sufficient.
I very much like bringing these concepts of unambiguous past and ambiguous future to this problem.
As a pattern theorist, I agree that only memory (and the other parts of my brain's patterns which establish my values, personality, etc) matter when it comes to who I am. If I were to wake up tomorrow with Britney Spear's memories, values, and personality, 'I' will have ceased to exist in any important sense, even if that brain still had the same 'consciousness' that Usul describes at the bottom of his post.
Once one links personal identity to one's memories, values and personality, the same kind of thinking about uploading/copying can be applied to future Everett branches of one's current self, and the unambigous past/ambiguous future concepts are even more obviously important.
In a similar way to Usul not caring about his copy, one might 'not care' about a version of oneself in a different Everett branch, but it would still make sense to care about both future instances of yourself BEFORE the split happens, due to the fact that you are uncertain which future you will be 'you' (and of course, in the Everett branch case, you will experience being both, so I guess both will be 'you'). And to bring home the main point regarding uploading/copying, I would much prefer that an entity with my memories/values/personality continue to exist in at least one Everett branch, even if such entities will cease existing in other branches.
Even though I don't have a strong belief in quantum multiverse theory, thinking about Everett branches helped me resolve the is-the-copy-really-me? dilemma for myself, at least. Of course, the main difference (for me) is that with Everett branches, the different versions of me will never interact. With copies of me existing in the same world, I would consider my copy as a maximally close kin and my most trusted ally (as you explain elsewhere in this thread).