"From the point of view of your body, it would be someone giving you anesthetic, and then killing you." The point of view of your body ends when it is anesthet

"From the point of view of your body, it would be someone giving you anesthetic, and then killing you." The point of view of your body ends when it is anesthetized. That's the definition of "anesthetize" that I'm using here - a reversible cessation of consciousness. (Of course, if you woke it up rather than kill it, it would continue from that point on, and then there would be two of you, one in the computer, one out, whose experiences would then diverge.) "The copy is in no way privileged." Never said it was. Just the opposite, in fact. Neither the copy nor the body is privileged. "What about this experiment: ... Would you expect that when you get shot, you'll 'wake up' inside the computer? If so, by what mechanism? If not, how does this case differ from the first?" No, the other copy of you would wake up in the computer at step 2, not step 3. At that point there would be two entities with identical histories that then begin to diverge (like a git branch). Anything experienced by the physical body after step 1 would be erased after step 3, so there would be a death of a sort involved in this scenario. The anesthetization/euthanasia steps don't do anything special or magical, they just prevent that divergence from occurring. "Alternatively, what if we copy your consciousness into another sleeping organic brain, and wake up both of you. What makes the new copy, but not the old one 'you'?" Nothing. You're both you (though one of you is probably more confused than the other.) We're running up against the limits of the English language, which is why correct statements can sound so absurd. We just don't have the right pronouns for this type of consciousness split. Let me put it to you this way: Suppose that there was some sort of sufficiently-indistinguishable-from-magic device that actually "transferred" you (whatever that means to you) from an organic brain to a digital afterlife. How would the experience of that be distinguishable to you from the anesthetization/euthanasia scenario I originally described? What would be the difference, as far as the digital consciousness is concerned?