Let’s think about this 4-dimensionally. I am a 4-dimensional flatworm about 1.7 meters tall by 90 light-years long (I hope). On one end my component parts come together and assemble themselves hierarchically; on the other end they separate in disordered fashion until they are indistinguishable from the environment. That is me, and the middle part especially is well-defined.
Suppose that somewhere else there is another worm, perhaps one that is not as long because one end was duplicated from the first. Is that me? No. Maybe it could take over some of the same functions, but I am only the first worm.
If you could guarantee continuity, so that the worm becomes progressively more cybernetic over its length, perhaps you could convince me.
There was a role-playing game world where minds can be backed up, cloned, edited, merged, hacked, transmitted, inserted into various bodies, etc. No big deal, at least for the people who routinely undergo such operations. Maybe you are a mercenary: for a special mission you’ll want an appropriate combat body available. Spawn off a mind which, for security purposes, is not a perfect copy; an emergency transmitter in the head ensures some or all of the information will be still sent back in case you die, and if you do make it back you can be more carefully re-integrated.
That’s basically the premise of the Takeshi Kovacs books (Altered Carbon, etc…)
Basically every person is implanted with something called a ‘cortical stack’ at birth, and it’s basically a sort of mental DVR-type device that records all your thoughts/memories/etc… so that if your body is killed, that stack can have its data downloaded and inserted into another body via its stack.
So in that particular universe, bodies are called ‘sleeves’ for obvious reasons. Of course, there are vat-grown ones engineered for combat, cheap ones, and anything in between, etc… as well as the normal sort of naturally born ones.
The first book in the series basically starts out with a person who has the sort of insurance policy that the OP proposes, trying to figure out what happened to make the policy kick in. In other words, he wakes up missing a month of his memories and hires the protagonist to figure it out. (trying not to spoil too much).
There’s also the concept that punishment is exacted by keeping someone “on ice”, meaning unsleeved and unconscious for some period of time. Copying one’s self is a capital crime (i.e. they erase your stack and you are truly dead).
And interestingly enough, they can transmit the contents of stacks between worlds- sort of a data-driven interstellar travel, and you get a new sleeve when you arrive.
Sure. It was not explicitly an Altered Carbon game, though. I do not remember exactly which game it was; it may have been Eclipse Phase in which case all that stuff was more or less directly lifted from Altered Carbon: