I don't acknowledge an upload as "me" in any meaningful sense of the term; if I copied my brain to a computer and then my body was destroyed, I still think of that as death and would try to avoid it.
A thought struck me a few minutes ago that seems like it might get around that, though. Suppose that rather than copying my brain, I adjoined it to some external computer in a kind of reverse-Ebborian act; electrically connecting my synapses to a big block of computrons that I can consciously perform I/O to. Over the course of life and improved tech, that block expands until, as a percentage, most of my thought processes are going on in the machine-part of me. Eventually my meat brain dies -- but the silicon part of me lives on. I think I would probably still consider that "me" in a meaningful sense. Intuitively I feel like I should treat it as the equivalent of minor brain damage.
Obviously, one could shorten the period of dual-life arbitrarily and I can't point to a specific line where expanded-then-contracted-consciousness turns into copying-then-death. The line that immediately comes to mind is "whenever I start to feel like the technological expansion of my mind is no longer an external module, but the main component," but that feels like unjustified punting.
I'm curious what other people think, particularly those that share my position on destructive uploads.
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Edited to add:
Compare a destructive upload to non-destructive. Copy my mind to a machine non-destructively, and I still identify with meat-me. You could let machine-me run for a day, or a week, or a year, and only then kill off meat-me. I don't like that option and would be confused by someone who did. Destructive uploads feel like the limit of that case, where the time interval approaches zero and I am killed and copied in the same moment. As with the case outlined above, I don't see a crossed line where it stops being death and starts being transition.
An expand-contract with interval zero is effectively a destructive upload. So is a copy-kill with interval zero. So the two appear to be mirror images, with a discontinuity at the limit. Approach destructive uploads from the copy-then-kill side, and it feels clearly like death. Approach them from the expand-then-contract side, and it feels like continuous identity. Yet at the limit between them they turn into the same operation.
It does if the the underlying issue is not actually an issue unless you choose certain, in my opinion inadequate, definitions of the key terms. I can't force you not to do that. I can point out that it has implications for things like going to sleep that you probably wouldn't like, I can try my best to help resolve the confusions that I believe have generated those definitions in the first place and I can try to flesh out, with tools like analogy, what I consider to be a more useful way of thinking about identity. Unfortunately, all of these things could potentially open me up to the charge of changing definitions but if that's the case I can only plead guilty because that's the appropriate response in situations where the debate happens to turn on the definitions of the relevant terms.
Error wrote that, in the case of non-destructive copying, he doesn't consider the upload to be a legitimate continuation of the copied entity but he does consider the flesh-and-blood, 'meat' version still walking around to be exactly that. I guess the intuition here is that this case effectively settles the question of identity because you would have a flesh-and-blood human who would have first-hand knowledge that it was the real one ("How can he be me? I'm here!")
I totally get that intuition. I can see how to most people it would be just obvious that the Machine-Version of Error is not the Meat-Version of Error. It's because it's not!
The problem is that neither of those entities are the thing that was copied. What was copied was Error as he was at a particular moment. The Meat-Version isn't that. The Meat-Version is not made of the same particles, nor does he have the same mental states. The Meat Version is a legitimate continuation of the old Meat Version but so is the Machine Version.
I remember having my photograph taken at the seaside when I was a child. When I look at the child in that photograph now I regard myself as the same person. I know we're not made of the same particles, I know that I have memories of events that he hasn't experienced yet, knowledge that he doesn't have, a completely different personality...On my definition of identity, however, I get to call him 'me.' I can consistently point at this photograph and say, 'that was me, when I was a child.'
What I want to know is, how can someone who rejects this view of identity point at a picture of himself as a child and say the same thing without opening the door for a future upload to look at a photograph of him right now (i.e. before the upload) and say, 'that was me, when I was made of meat'?
Just because the machine version remembers what the meat version did, doesn't mean the conscious meat version didn't die in the uploading process. Nothing you have said negates the death + birth interpretation. Your definitions are still missing the point.