"San Junipero" from Black Mirror explores this topic. It's a great episode. The best episode from Black Mirror in my opinion. Dying people can transfer their "selves" into a computer system with other willing participants. You remain the same age forever and still play out life as you would in your old body. It's a forever thing though. Or for however long the system holds up.

This topic has been done a billion times in film and literature. I watch the show Westworld, which I think is amazing and possibly the best show ever. I just love philosophical topics though. The main characters of the show are programmed robots who begin to become sentient and question everything. Every week I'm intrigued to see where it goes. The last episode of the show, if it's the same writers and actors, should be a mind blower if they do it right. A human man on the show asks another woman if she's real. She responds with, "If you can't tell, does it matter?".

I would think unless there is some type of tweaking in your memory, then you would know there is a break in continuity in terms of your body and appearance etc.

I guess if you are programmed to think or see or believe something, or if the replacement "reality" was so detailed and good, then you wouldn't know the difference.

What if we are the equivalent to "robots", but the way we're programmed, we see our wires and fluids as veins and blood etc?

If you copied your mind into a computer, would the computer you start screaming "You've transferred the wrong one, I'm the human, noooooooooooo" and would have to live an eternaty believing that it was the real you trapped in a computer while the copy was enjoying your human form.

You know how animals are hard wired at birth to be instinctively like their parents. The offspring knows a little something they didn't have to be taught. That would be us after the transfer to the computer. A whole different ententy...but not us.

First off the concept of transferring the consciousness creates a break in the continuity. You would die, a fax is not the original. This same concept is true with teleportation, each time you were teleported you would die and v2, 3, 4, 5 would be created completely unaware that your first consciousness has died and the new one would continue to exist.

Secondly, you are not the same person you were yesterday. At a celluar level the body recreates cells on a regular basis, many portions of you are 100% new from when you were born. The brain creates new connections based off of experience, some weigh in hard, others are light. Either way your response and reaction to some items are different based on experience, look at PTSD. It's an extreme version of this, but the reality is there. Learning to ride a bike is not muscle but muscle control, which happens in the brain. The inability of a computer to change in this way would create a permanent version of you that would no longer develop (assuming the computer was similar to those that exist today).

Lastly, it would be impossible for you to see yourself as you want to be. There is a good chance that you would not be able to mentally cope with the transfer. How do you feel hunger? Do you need to sleep? Do you feel sexual desire? Most of those feelings are a chemical release which no longer exists. You may be similar on day 1, but within a week I'd bet you'd be looking for death as most of what makes a human, you can never hope to do in a computer or machine.

Transferred to a new biological body may work, but you'd still die in the process and v2 would continue to exist.

It's hard to know since we don't yet know exactly what consciousness is. I've wondered the same thing watching Star Trek, when they beam somebody down to a planet. Is there continuity there, or is one consciousness "lost" and replaced with a duplicate consciousness? Could that person even tell the difference given that that reconstituted "self" has all the same memories?

Who know's the phantom know's.

Are you the same person you were ten years ago? Five years ago? No. And yet you're still you.
Continuity of experience, in my estimation, is what matters. A change in senses doesn't mean you become someone or something else, just ask someone who's gone deaf or blind, or developed synaesthesia. Even the brain can change--the person whose brain it is is still, in their experience, the same person.

Transhumanism is a ways off, though, so we still have loads of time to philosophise about it.

I believe we'll find out in the next 10 years.

Interesting question. There’s a short but fascinating novel on Kindle which delves into this very topic. It’s entitled “The Staggering Implications of the Mystery of Existence” by William Fleming.

My Penis disagree I am just my mind. Now, I am not afraid of dying. Same individuals that claim there is nothing else at the other side of passing are the same ones that want to be transfered to computers and robotic machines. What an irony and lack of guts in facing reality of existance!

For some reason I find these discussions irritating and pointless.

Human emotions, which emanate from our brain also produce physiological effects around the rest of our body and vice versa. It is a case of body and mind interconnected. This is fundamental.

So transplanting a mind into a machine becomes insanely naive. It will cease to be the same mind and can never be equivalent to a human mind because of this missing interaction between flesh and thought. And also... What's the point of it?