““If biological algorithms are the important part of what makes us who we are, rather than the physical stuff, then it’s a possibility that we will someday be able to copy our brains, upload them, and live forever in silica. But there’s an important question here: is it really you? Not exactly. The uploaded copy has all your memories and believes it was you, just there, standing outside the computer, in your body. Here’s the strange part: if you die and we turn on the simulation one second later, it would be a transfer. It would be no different to beaming up in Star Trek, when a person is disintegrated, and then a new version is reconstituted a moment later. Uploading may not be all that different from what happens to you each night when you go to sleep: you experience a little death of your consciousness, and the person who wakes up on your pillow the next morning inherits all your memories, and believes him or herself to be you. Are””
