SOMA is a great game that touches on this topic, btw. It's like a movie, so watching a playthrough is almost as good as the game itself.
But would it even know it's a backup? If it (or say, "he") has your memories, he will remember your first kiss as his first kiss, he'll look at your SO and feel the feelings you have looking at your SO, and think "Oh, let me greet them the way I usually do, 'What's up buttercup?'.". I think we're just the sum of our memories, and if the memories are identical, wouldn't it add up to the same person?
It's basically like the teleporter that deconstructs you and then reconstructs you somewhere else. You get to experience waking into one end and then you die. Your life is over. The fact that something walks out the other end doesn't matter anymore. Even if to an outside observer it'll be indistinguishable from you simply having moved - the clone will even describe the experience of moving - you are now dead.
But will you even be aware of that?
> Even if to an outside observer it'll be indistinguishable from you
And how about the inside observer?
I used to think like you do. But now I think, Logan2 will have your memory, it should even think "well that's done, now where's my wife, she said she'll meet me and after this procedure we'll go get ice cream.". Or things like "Ah yeah I got to deal with my brother, he said something hurtful and we need to fix this conflict.". And your "soul" should not notice anything being different.
If the copies are identical, shouldn't they generate the same thoughts, be triggered by the same things, like the smell of the wife's perfume or be e.g. irrationally angry at someone revving their car, and are we aware enough to think "Hang on, something's different?".
To be technical about it, it's like having a virtual machine's state be copied onto a new host system, I think even the process called awareness or soul is a result of our software/hardware configuration, and nothing external, and the awareness would be an identical copy.
In your analogy, if you copied the VM state onto two different host systems, I would think each host system would be a separate conscious experience. It's whatever being a host system is that generates consciousness, not the state itself.
Can people stop missing the point and asking if the clone will know that it's a clone or not? Because that doesn't really matter. It doesn't matter what the clone thinks - I still died.
I see you're in no mood to argue, but to me this death seems like the view of an external observer. As I say, I think my clone will happily live on thinking he's me, with all his (my) memories and his feelings and thoughts about the world, and about his own mind...
I think the soul is just like an instance of a software running on hardware, and if the software and hardware are identical, why should the copy of an instance not think "I'm instance 'LoganDark'"?
Subjectively, true, your original died, but if there's an identical copy, won't this perspective of the subject just be transferred over to the copy, with all the identical historical past?
Basically, you killed someone, then restored a snapshot of when they were still alive. The one you killed will never know of the snapshot or get to be that snapshot, while the snapshot will live on exactly as the original would have. I don't want to be that original who never gets to see the snapshot.
Yes, the snapshot will inherit everything that makes me "me", and yes the snapshot will get to live life normally. But I die.
That could, theoretically, be a way to appease those who suffer from species dysphoria. Not any time soon, though.
I'm not sure if there have been any studies on it yet - people are only just starting to recognize gender dysphoria as a legitimate condition. Species dysphoria probably sounds utterly insane.
I don't experience either gender or species dysphoria, but that seems like a way to "cure" species dysphoria, unlike gender dysphoria which is actually workable. I know a few therians and really feel for them, having such a condition and not being able to do much of anything doesn't sound like a fun existence.
I've been trying to find my way since childhood, but it's taking a while. Hopefully I figure it out eventually. Having DID as well certainly doesn't help.
It's not a fun existence in and of itself, but I still have my fun every now and then.
Feel free to contact me directly if you'd like to talk more.
I left a comment elsewhere in the thread about the teleporter that deconstructs you and then reconstructs you somewhere else. That's what this would be like.