I have suggested before that all subjective continuity of identity is
an artifact of memory. Just as an upload would experience "waking up"
in a new body, or as a Star-Trek transporter style deconstruction and
replication at a distance would produce a person with an experience of
displacement, in each instant we invent the passage of time and
construct a subjectively continuous model of self. In each moment we
are the upload waking up, relieved to still be alive. Taking the view
that there really is a stronger or more "real" meaning to identity is,
in my view, the pitfall that leads to all this dualistic stuff about
the importance of going one neuron at a time and these head-of-a-pin
"who's the real me" arguments.
-matt
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