All of Charles M's Comments + Replies

Within this framework, whether or not you "feel that continuity" would mostly be a fact about the ontology your mindstate uses thinking about teleportation.  Everything in this post could be accurate and none of it would be incompatible with you having an existential crisis upon being teleported, freaking out upon meeting yourself, etc. Nor does anything here seem to make a value judgement about what the copy of you should do if told they're not allowed to exist.  Attempting revolution seems like a perfectly valid response; self defense is held as a fairly basic human right after all. (I'm shocked that isn't already the plot of a sci-fi story.) It would also be entirely possible for both of your copies to hold conviction that they're the one true you - Their experiences from where they sit being entirely compatible with that belief. (Definitely the plot of at least one Star Trek episode.) There's not really any pressure currently to have thinking about mind copying that's consistent with every piece of technology that could ever conceivably be built.  There's nothing that forces minds to have accurate beliefs about anything that won't kill them or wouldn't have killed their ancestors in fairly short order.  Which is to say mostly that we shouldn't expect to get accurate beliefs about weird hypotheticals often without having changed our minds at least once.

The key to this koan (at least for me) is undoing the assumption that there can be only one of you. There's one of you that steps in and one that steps out. And they're the same you. What I value about me is the pattern of beliefs, memories, and values. The other me has has an identical brain state, so all of those. It is simply another me. I care about the second one pretty much exactly as much as I care about the same pattern continuing in a more similar location and with more similar molecules instantiating the pattern. That's because I care far less about where I am and which molecules I'm made of than the pattern of identity in my mind/brain. The same as you can have two of anything else that's close-enough-for-the-purpose. I can have two rocks if I don't care about the difference in their molecular makeup. I can have two mes. Yes, you have some sort of shared consciousness with the copy; it's the same shared consciousness between the you of today and the you that wakes up tomorrow. It doesn't imply sharing events that happen simultaneously or anything mystical about "sharing consciousness". That's why I'd happily step into the destructive teleporter if I was certain the copy on the other side would have exactly my mind-pattern, including memories, beliefs, and values. That's me.