So would a “black box” that talked like you, thought like you, reacted like you be you? Alan Turing would say so.
Cyber life might be very pleasant…except no sex!
If you can define the difference between me being me, and me being a machine that thinks it’s me, I’ll eat a bug.
Why not? Sex is in your brain- it’s a software feature.
Preferably ‘stiffware.’ 
Well, firmware, anyway.
The term is “wetware” guys. Srsly.
I would recommend Nozick’s discussion of teleportation, in Philosophic Explanations.
One problem is that “You” is pretty much an illusion anyway. Benjamin Livet of UCSF did an experiment where people hooked up to electrodes were told to watch a clock and report the time (in seconds) that they decided to move their wrist. It turns out neural activity occurs before conscious decisions are made. That experiment was done during the 1980s, and there have been others like it. “You” is itself a construct, one that occurs after decisions are made. There’s no there there.
Ref: Richard Wiseman, Paranormality: Why we see what isn’t there (2011)
How would you feel about stepping into a Star Trek style transporter, to be vaporized, with no certainty that you would re-appear at the other end?
Now, how would you feel about stepping into a Star Trek style transporter, if you appeared at the other end before you disappear from the originating transporter? That is, another copy of “you” would exist simultaneously with the original “you”, and then the original “you” would be disintegrated? How would you (that is, the original “you”) feel, knowing that you are about to cease to exist just because there’s another copy of “you” out there?
If you want to purchase artificial memories of marvelous vacations to Mars or whatever, you can at least read about it in Total Recall or go see the movie! (By all accounts, the earlier Schwarzenegger version was better than the recent remake.) Once “you” are ensconced in a silicon chip, they could provide you with all the sex that “you” could possibly wish for, maybe even more than the original “you” ever scored.
For a price, of course.
One interesting possibility is the ‘historical reconstruction’ concept. Historical reconstructions are being created all the time in our culture; from the superb historical fictions of Hilary Mantell and Phillipa Gregory to William Shatner playing Alexander the Great and John Wayne as Genghis Khan. Our culture is full of 'em.
When and if we can create human-equivalent AI, we might decide to build best-guess reconstructions of these historical figures which could have a life of their own. These reconstructions would be presumably based on the best historical evidence and scholarship available. Imagine a Lincoln-bot or a Churchill-bot, perhaps dispensing idiosyncratic advice to anyone who would listen.
Of course a historical character who has been recorded on film or has contributed extensive autobiographical writings would be easier to model than Temüjin or Mark Anthony. Even easier would be people who have created a vlog or lifecasted themselves. Some people today are already committing every tedious detail of their own life to posterity.
Maybe a reconstructed characterbot which is created from someone’s v-log and facebook profile would be more realistic than the versions of historical figures we are familiar with in literature and the arts.
Maybe, - just maybe - the characterbot which is created from all this extensive data left behind by a modern human might be made even more realistic if the frozen head of that individual is available as well. The structures of the frozen brain, damaged and distrupted as they no doubt are, might offer some clues and some constraints on the model.
That might be the best hope for immortality the current crop of heads might hope for- a best guess reconstruction at some indefinite future date.
True. Me being dead, it won’t make much of a difference whether I’m cremated or frozen. And I really do believe that. To me, it’s more plausible that someone can travel back through time, copy my living body and bring the copy forward into the future than that they can take an ice-damaged thousand-year-old brain-cicle and turn it back into me.
However, there is the issue of the money spent on the cryogenics. I hate wasting money. Even if my heirs don’t need or want that money, I feel like I’d get more “immortality” by helping a needy family than by freezing my brain.
Mathematically, I’d say the odds are the same. Dead is dead.
All of them.
Bumping this thread of mine. Question: is a necropolis in the coldest part of the Antarctic a more practical method? I heard there’s a spot there that’s so cold, it will kill you if you breath the air straight in.
There was a very cool X-FILES episode similar to this. It was titled “Kill Switch”.
That the answer to a different question (how many people in cryogenic tanks are dead)
Frozen dead guy days. There’s one that’s on dry ice in Nederland Colorado -
But so icy and refreshing on a hot day! 
If cryogenics will ever work, no. You don’t want it that cold, because it freezes too many things (that’s the problem with regular cryogenics, too - you want it cold to kill bacteria, but not to break down cell walls. Tricky problem. Anyway, at -135 F, it only gets worse).
More innocent, well-intentioned ignorance, I suspect. One’s entire neural system is a package. Nothing magical happens at the brain boundary. The neurons outside the brain do important stuff too, and remember things. “Muscle memory” is a real thing. Or, maybe the company and the clients understand that, and are willing to live (*live *- ha!) with it. I’m commenting on stuff I haven’t researched.
Since this dead thread has been re-animated…
No, it would not. I heard a fascinating NPR story about “downloading” the brain’s info. Apparently people are working on it. One guy even talked about everyone having access to this info creating a borg-like one mind or common consciousness.
Anyway, I started wondering about it. If a live human downloaded the contents of his or her mind to a storage receptacle, at that point each “brain” would start making new memories and thoughts/ideas that the other one wouldn’t have. In a few years they could be thought of as separate “souls”.
[sup][sup]This is just a thought experiment, I realize this is waaaay in the future… if at all.[/sup][/sup]
I’m fairly sure that’s incorrect. The cryo companies use liquid nitrogen to make corpsicles - that’s colder than any place on Earth. Damage to cells is notionally prevented by infusion with cryoprotectants such as propylene glycol.
Also (nitpick) humans don’t have cell walls.
The problem with an Antarctic Necropolis is actually: it’s not going to be cold enough. It’s cold - and that would make the cryogenic refrigeration equipment more efficient to run, but this saving would almost certainly be offset by the difficulty of maintaining any kind of technical facility in the Antartctic.