Come the day when you actually have such a choice to make, I don't think such philosophy will matter much. You'll be embedded in a whole social world to help inform your decision. You'll be able to talk to uploads and their copies, and read articles about their experiences. You might well know friends and relatives who've tried it. You'll have consumer reports type evaluations. You'll have reasonable expectations about how much fun it is to be an upload, how much pain they suffer, the economic rewards possible to uploads, and the social penalties they suffer. And you'll have a reasonable idea of the rewards and penalties to you from creating such a creature.
Given the range of feelings out there about the value of creating new
creatures, when the joy of a life outweighs the sorrows, how much we like
being around people like ourselves, even about "is it me?", it seems obvious
to me that *some* people will choose to be uploads. And given that some do,
I think that, using our best understanding of people and social systems,
we can say a lot about all these factors that will influence the choice to
"parent" an upload copy.
This seems like the interesting question to me: assuming many people
choose to make uploads and upload copies, what will life be like for such
uploads, and for those that don't choose to make copies? The answer to
this question will be a much better basis for choosing to make a copy than
"is it me?"
(I made an initial stab at such analysis years ago with my article http://hanson.berkeley.edu/uploads.html, but there's lots more to do.)
Robin Hanson
hanson@econ.berkeley.edu http://hanson.berkeley.edu/
RWJF Health Policy Scholar, Sch. of Public Health 510-643-1884
140 Warren Hall, UC Berkeley, CA 94720-7360 FAX: 510-643-2627