

Identity is complex social adaptation and it is directly connected with hard problem of consciousness.
I agree that identity is directly connected with the hard problem of consciousness. That identity is a social adaptation seems plausible (to me) but not certain.
So we can't finally solve any identity paradox on our current level of knowledge.
It seems to me that, per mwengler's observation, we already have past copies (your category number 1); identical twins are past copies that branched shortly after conception. Past copies, it seems to me, do not share a common identity and are distinct people with distinct conscious experiences. I'm not sure that I see any identity paradoxes involving past copies.
Current, mirror copies (your category number 2), cannot exist in a conscious state for any meaningful amount of time (except perhaps as EMs where the hosting environment ensures that they have identical stimuli, are kept in sync from a simulation standpoint, etc.), so mirror copies can be ignored, it seems to me.
Future copies (your category number 3) do seem to have some paradoxes (or at least they are unclear to me). Specifically,
if I know that I am going to be non-destructively copied in five minutes, should I care more about one future copy than I do the other? I suspect that I should not.
If I know that I am going to be copied but the original will be destroyed in the process, should this concern me? It seems like, per #1, it should not. But, somehow, I don't think that I'd be very eager to go through with a destructive copy process.
How can it be that the identity of a person and his/her future copy is the same (which seems plausible), but two past copies have distinct identities? It seems like personal identity should be transitive.
So it seems to me that future copies are paradoxical. And of course future copies will matter if/when uploading becomes possible, so we will eventually need to resolve (or accept) the paradoxes.
I agree that only future copies are paradoxical. And most paradoxes are about are decisions. So we could try to solve them as decision theory problems.
If identity is something real, it should have properties, like transitivness, and copy paradoxes should have definite solutions.
But is identity is only illusion or social agreement we could redefine it according our needs.
One of the possible approaches to identity problem is to ask why identity exist at all? What are its roots?
One of its roots is in evolutionary psychology. In early human societies each pe...