> I don't want a copy of me to live forever, I want to live forever myself. Copying my brain won't copy my conscious self.

... is a notion that I think is based on faulty assumptions. I've been trying to address why I believe this is only intuitively right but physically wrong in like 10 posts all over here against pretty much anyone who cared to comment, without a single voice of support.

I recognize I'm alone in this. I get this means I'm likely wrong about this, and you're right in some way to assume that I just don't understand (or to quote an email: don't have the mental capacity nor the education required to understand).

I don't understand how, once you introduce the concept of making an adequate copy, that still means there is an "original" and a "copy" which somehow isn't another instance of the original. I don't understand why the concept of making a copy is fine when we're talking about, say, a piece of text but then immediately seizes to be valid when we're talking about minds.

Collectively, you guys tried to make me understand by invoking several things. For example, the argument was raised that because you obviously can't have several instances of your consciousness at the same time, this can never work. There was the argument that any would-be left-over physical body somehow remains the home of the mind, and there would obviously be an impostor around pretending to be me but ultimately not being me. At two points, it was suggested that I (specifically, I, Udo) be killed to prove that I care about my existence and the existence of forks based on me, which I do and which does not really have any meaningful connection to the question of the feasibility of copying. I also said that the "problem" of the left-over body most likely won't arise due to technical limitations of the process. Still, that didn't count and people still think that uploading minds is like building pyramids. Finally, the argument was made that both instances are by necessity different, if only because they occupy a different positions in space, to which I tried to explain that, yes, they're different and they'll continue to become more different over time, and yet that doesn't have any real bearing on the proposed possibility or impossibility of the whole concept.

This is where I apologize and withdraw from the discussion. You certainly tried to explain it harder than most people here, but in the end that didn't work out. I'm old enough to have the strong feeling that at some point in the future, a populist Kurzweil 2.0 will come along and everybody will just come around to this conclusion as if it had just been invented.

And that's fine with me. I don't need to be right, but I do want to have the option of being uploaded. Repulsion to the very idea is deeply ingrained within our society. Attempts to prolong life are virtually unknown outside horror literature where it's always portrayed as monstrous. Even "progressive" sites such as io9 draw the line here. It goes against the foundation of most religions, and it contradicts the intuition of most people.

Of all things, a Buffy quote comes to mind here, allow me to paraphrase it: "You'll live again, but it won't be you. A demon sets up in your body, having your memories and thinking your thoughts, but you'll be gone." - I think this sums up the opinion of most people when it comes to transhumanism. And once again, you're right, I struggle to understand this at every level.