Yes. That doesn’t make them you. What makes them you is that you can see through their eyes, will their body to act as you do your own, things like that. If I so choose, right now I can make myself walk to the fridge and get a glass of milk. I cannot do that with a backup taken a month ago, even if both bodies are alive.
You miss the point: the clone is the patient’s next-of-kin.
Agreed. So, once there are multiple bodies running around who share the same memories up to a certain point, they are different people, whose personalities will start to diverge from that point onwards, all of whom have an equal claim to being the original person.
But the original has not ceased to exist, except in the same sense that yesterday’s “me” is gone and has been replaced by today’s “me”. I have an interest in seeing to it that there will be a tomorrow’s “me”, despite the fact that it won’t be exactly the same person as the one who is typing this right now.
Ah yes, I missed that one indeed. Obviously that is correct from your point of view but not from mine.
Dennis Haysbert: Cylon Insurance… They Have A Plan…(for you)
Yes, I’ll take model #6 please…
Hell, i’d sign up and then suicide right after the first upload.
This is basically my view on the matter, though the people who say maintaining a backup if you have children or something important that requires you to be around is an aspect I hadn’t considered. I still don’t think the resurrected backup would be me though but would certainly be a version of me as far as everyone else is concerned.
But this is not the way it is depicted in the novel I’m reading and in other sci-fi novels with similar technology.
I just find it illogical on the face of it, for example if we have a hypothetical person called Dave who has a regular backup automatically made (Dave 1.1), if Dave dies his particularly conciousness tied to his particularly body has ceased to exist, Dave 1.1 wakes up with Daves memories up until the point of the download but that doesn’t make him the same person as Dave. And what if its not one month but ten years between backup and resurrection, how could that possibly be considered the same person and if its not at what timeframe does it cease to be identical? Personally I would say the moment the conciousness diverges they become two different, seperate and distinct people.
Appeals to a soul, religious or otherwise doesn’t come into it.
Thanks for the answers everyone! 
What if you died and were brought back to life? Are you still you?
In the same body and a period of time having elapsed? I’d be a lot more comfortable considering that to be me than considering someone in a different body and a previous copy of memories to be me sure, I don’t consider the latter to even possibly be ‘me’.
A break in continuity of conciousness is arguable, but the scenario in the OP isn’t simply a break, its the creation of an entirely new conciousness, the original conciousness continues to exist.
He is Dave with a new body. No different than if all of his limbs and organs had been replaced, one at a time, with prosthetic replacements. He is “no longer the same person” only in the same way that anybody who has gone through a traumatic experience is no longer the same person as before. (Or, for that matter, that when I wake up tomorrow I will no longer be exactly the same person I am today.)
The difference between Dave 1.0 and Dave 1.1 is much smaller than the difference between me today and me when I was a teenager. Yet if I met somebody who asked “hey, are you the same Walton Firm that I went to high school with?” then I wouldn’t hesitate to answer ‘yes’ if appropriate. The teenage me didn’t die, he just went through a series of changes and eventually became the person I am today.
Same situation as if somebody had suffered traumatic memory loss and forgotten the last 10 years of their life. That would actually be a stronger case for talking about being different people – you can imagine learning about what your “other self” has been up to during those 10 years, and feeling like those things were done by a different person who you don’t feel any particular kinship with. You might meet the person claiming to be your current spouse and feel no attraction at all, for example.
And yet the original conciousness (Dave) is still gone, its world-line and experience has terminated and it does that conciousness no good at all to have an identical body walking around with its memories up until the point of the download.
I think that in this debate both sides are using fundementally different understandings of certain words and concepts.
Yeah, it’s a strange notion to me. The argument that making a perfect copy will somehow transfer some intrinsic youness in terms of self-awareness.
I’m just not convinced by any argument to that end.
Yes, probably. I think this is the central issue:
[QUOTE=Disposable Hero]
A break in continuity of conciousness is arguable, but the scenario in the OP isn’t simply a break, its the creation of an entirely new conciousness, the original conciousness continues to exist.
[/QUOTE]
To me, the idea that a “break in continuity” (such as would happen with general anaesthesia, for example) could mean that you are not the same person anymore, is not even arguable – to me, it’s as strange as claiming that when you put on different clothes you become a different person and your previous self has died. But if you consider that (the anaesthesia example, not the clothes) something which is seriously up for debate, then it isn’t surprising at all that moving your consciousness into a new body would be equivalent to suicide for you. If “consciousness cannot be discontinuous” was my starting axiom, then I would certainly draw the same conclusion about the backup/restore case.
It’s the Transporter argument all over again. In that situation, there would be two of “me.”
Is a Christian “OK with being killed” because it means he goes straight to heaven and meets God?
Do you drive like a maniac, just because your air bag will likely save your life?
But unless you believe in souls, then your “intrinsic youness” is entirely determined by your brain – by the state of your synapses and neurons, the levels of various chemicals, etc. Your self-awareness or your personality are not some mystical otherworldly thing which is by definition uncopyable; it is a part of the physical structure of your brain just as much as your political opinions and your ice-cream preferences are.
When you enjoy a piece of music, or fall in love with someone, or think deep philosophical thoughts such as “what does it really mean to be me”, all of that can in principle be explained in terms of chemicals and electrical impulses moving around in your brain. That doesn’t mean those experiences aren’t real, but it does mean that, at least in theory, the state of your brain could be scanned and stored and copied and restored into a different body, and there wouldn’t be anything missing. You would still like the same music and be in love with the same person; any attempts to “look at your own brain” via introspective thought would yield the same answers as they did before.
At least, that’s what I believe, and I am pretty sure it is compatible with current mainstream scientific ideas about how the brain works. Clearly, not everybody agrees – for starters, anybody who believes in a spiritual afterlife must necessarily believe that there is indeed some central essence of a person which remains after the brain has rotted away. So yeah, I shouldn’t be surprised at being in the minority here. But if you agree with me on the “no soul outside the brain” issue, then I don’t see why it’s so hard to understand that I would be OK with losing my current body as long my personality and consciousness were restored shortly thereafter into a just-as-good new one.
But in the original scenario there is no movement of conciousness, its not simply that there is a break or discontinuity, the copy has already been made and the original conciousness continues to exist. That original conciousness has no connection to the copy that is being held in stasis, when it ceases it doesn’t ‘leap back’ to the stored copy, its gone for good.
As someone upthread stated the mere fact that you could technically awaken the copy in a new body while the original is still extant means they can’t be the same person/conciousness.
Yes, if you focus on threads of consciousness then indeed the original one has ended. I just think that’s less relevant than the question of whether the same person, with all of their memories and ideas and their unique sense of humor and everything, is still walking around. Not only less relevant to their friends and loved ones, who won’t even need to know unless he chooses to tell them, but also to Dave himself.
We might as well retroactively declare the person who had the accident to have been a “branch off the main thread” and consider the guy walking around in the new body to be the “primary” Dave, who now has an interesting story to tell.
Certainly, somebody has still died. After all, there’s a body lying underneath a car or at the bottom of a rock-climbing crag or whatever, and there was somebody inside that body at the moment of impact. It’s just that in a world where people can be restored from backup as easily as computer files, death becomes pretty cheap and not something to worry about very much.
Introducing the idea of multiple copies running around simultaneously, does complicate things. But it doesn’t change the fact that it’s a bit strange to say that Dave is gone, when there is at least one person who claims to be Dave, who remembers being Dave since early childhood, and who can back up that claim by telling lots of facts that nobody other than Dave would know.
Anyway, I’m going to bed – perhaps there will be somebody continuing this conversation in my name tomorrow, but it won’t be me, exactly. 
I think we have hit the fundemental disconnect, for myself (and I believe others) the ‘thread of conciousness’ is the basic attribute of individual personhood and the most relevant aspect of this argument.
The person created from the backup is not the same person who has just died (which you seem to agree with), I don’t think it has much real impact on the concept of death, if your own distinct individual line of conciousness is terminated you are dead and gone just as certainly as in the present world where such back-up technology doesn’t exist.
The person being ‘restored’ isn’t the person that has just died, an earlier version of them perhaps, but still a distinct individual with a distinct line of conciousness which is not connected to the conciousness that has just died.
Personally it wouldn’t provide me much comfort at all to know that I had a back-up, in fact creating another version of myself like that strikes me as somewhat narcissistic, though I can certainly see the point as mentioned earlier if you have children or other important function where someone with your attributes and memories (until point of backup) would be useful to have around. But that still doesn’t do you any good.
Anyway, off to bed as well!
I just wanted to quip how well the position meshes with the username! 
I am soooo reminded of that recent thread by the guy who’s deathly terrified of having surgery because he thinks when he wakes up the from the anesthesia, he won’t be the same self he was before; or alternatively, he won’t know and won’t ever be able to find out.
What if the files get mixed up and someone gets restored from someone else!
What if someone begins to get senescent, but never discontinues having the monthly backups done? As the “original” brain declines, do the monthly backups get poorer and poorer? Or are the monthly backups cumulative, each adding to whatever was there before, so at least the latest backups don’t degenerate along with the original?
Can one person’s backups be restored to numerous other people (or clones thereof)? If we find the next Einstein, can we make a whole bunch of them?
What if some people have big-endian brains and some people have little-endian brains, and a byte-swapping error happens during the restore? You might have one badly scrambled mind there.
What if you wake up one fine morning and quickly discover that the whole world around you is subtly different – or maybe very different – than it was when you went to bed the night before? Could you infer that you are a restored clone of a once-living original who is now dead and gone? How would that make you feel?
Grin!
Oops! Screwed! (There was a Doonesbury strip where Zonker wondered the same thing about King Tut. What if he had been right, and his mummified remains were the key to eternal life? The tomb’s been opened. He’s screwed now!)
Interesting! What are the limits to the technology? Can they weave two recordings together? I can have the mental vigor of youth, but with all the memories of old age? This is also something asked of the Star Trek transporter: can it cure diseases and heal injuries?
This follows from the OP. The body is cloned, and the memories are digitally stored. It’s time for the Clone Wars!
Does the new body have to be baptized again, or is it the soul that is cleansed by baptism?
That’s just about normal for most of us, innit?