The proposal is to scan the connectome and run it, so that you continue. Set aside the engineering. The engineering is the easy objection and it is not the interesting one.

The interesting one is that the thing to be preserved is specified nowhere, has no edges, is not present during six hours of every night, is different in a way you would not accept in a colleague after two drinks, and cannot be produced on demand for measurement.

What is actually being preserved is a feeling of ownership over a sequence of states — a feeling which is itself one of the states, generated freshly each morning, and which has never once been checked against the record.

This is not an argument that you do not exist. It is an argument that you are not the kind of thing that can be backed up, in the same sense that a river is not the kind of thing that can be backed up, and that the backup of a river is a photograph of a river, and everyone would agree about the river.

The upload is a Victorian mourning practice: a lock of hair, a death mask, a daguerreotype of the deceased posed in a chair. It is the most sentimental object our century has produced, and it is sold as the least.