Soul or not, it wouldn't be me. Imagine that I was alive and existed next to the cloud copy of me. It would be 2 different minds with a common core. A database restore to a new cluster, that immediately became different afterward because our two experiences would drift. Funny enough, the db term for a db cluster which has two writable primary instances, which have received differing sets of writes containing different sets of data, is called a "split-brain".
So if I exist and have my own thoughts and the cloud copy exists and has its own thoughts, and we are taking in reality differently than each other, we are 2 distinct minds. Now imagine I died. What has that changed for the copy of me? Nothing. It's still a different mind than mine. My mind is dead. I'm dead. A copy of me existing after I die does not change the fact that I died. It does not help me, literally me, live forever.
What if you have done the procedure and after it woke up in artificial environment. You'd be aware that there's biological remnant of pre-procedure you that will still experience other things than you will including dying and death. But he's separate entity and you are glad it's not you that are about to die.
Basically if you wake up after the cloning as your old biological self then you just drew the short straw. It's up to you if it helps you or not that there's another you that will continue on whatever you were doing without the nuisance of dying. Some people might find calmness in that they can freely die and nothing of value will be lost.
What about startrek transporters? Wouldn't you use them because you are getting disintegrated and what's create at destination is just a copy of you but not you?
Presumably it’s the version of you that’s destined to become the “biological remnant” that making the decision to be cloned/copied?
So spending money or participating in that procedure would be entirely irrational from their perspective. What could they ever gain from that? They’d still be dead regardless of what the copy thinks or feels (until that procedure is done happens)
Spending the same resources to prolong your existence (even in a suboptimal state) seems literally infinite times more rational.
> spending money or participating in that procedure would be entirely irrational from their perspective.
Roughly as irrational as having children. Humans are not rational beings.
> What could they ever gain from that?
Continuation of what they were trying to achieve in life.
> Spending the same resources to prolong your existence (even in a suboptimal state) seems literally infinite times more rational.
That entirely depends on what you value. You may value living in your suboptimal state less than chance at making something happen that you wanted to see happen but due to bodily limitations are no loger able to progress on.
To define "me" in this context basically requires solving the Hard Problem of Consciousness [0].
To an external observer, all life, including humans, are nothing more than a complex set of electrical and chemical reactions, and in theory, with sufficient technology, you could take a perfect subatomic snapshot of someone's brain and predict exactly how they would react to any stimuli.
But then there are the first-person perspective experiences. We have words for it like "consciousness" or "mind", but no scientific explanation on how it works and why it shuts off when we go to sleep. The religious will explain it with the concept of a soul.
I don't think we can ever solve this Hard Problem. But I can claim to believe that if someone did snapshot my brain and recreate a perfect living replica in a new body, that I would not experience what that replica experiences. It might have a completely new consciousness behind it, or it could be a P-Zombie [1].
Maybe I'm actually the only conscious being in the entire universe and everyone else is a P-Zombie. Somehow, to me, that makes more sense than consciousness appearing out of nowhere.
> Maybe I'm actually the only conscious being in the entire universe and everyone else is a P-Zombie. Somehow, to me, that makes more sense than consciousness appearing out of nowhere.
That's because you live in Plato's cave, we all do.
Not necessarily. Some of us may have torn the illusory veils of Maya, and gleefully surf the waves of Indra's ocean from island to island, tasting all the delciously different somas.
Soul or not, it wouldn't be me. Imagine that I was alive and existed next to the cloud copy of me. It would be 2 different minds with a common core. A database restore to a new cluster, that immediately became different afterward because our two experiences would drift. Funny enough, the db term for a db cluster which has two writable primary instances, which have received differing sets of writes containing different sets of data, is called a "split-brain".
So if I exist and have my own thoughts and the cloud copy exists and has its own thoughts, and we are taking in reality differently than each other, we are 2 distinct minds. Now imagine I died. What has that changed for the copy of me? Nothing. It's still a different mind than mine. My mind is dead. I'm dead. A copy of me existing after I die does not change the fact that I died. It does not help me, literally me, live forever.