Duplicate yourself!

Have you ever thought about what happens to your consciousness when you die? There are people around foretelling that it will be possible to read out the complete configuration of all cells in a brain, store that configuration and simulate the same brain. Assume the brain is essentially what stores and processes the information constituting a consciousness (I mean the entity that is self-aware and claims to “be” you, as far as we can even say that). If a brain can be read out non-destructively, stored in a different substrate, be it electronically or anything else, what about that self-aware “you”? There will under my assumption be two of them. But in order to achieve immortality in that your consciousness never vanishes and can continue to interact with its environment, what have you gained then? I suppose nothing, because the consciousness that started the copy process is still running on short-lived biological substrate which will decay sooner or later. What you have achieved is a duplication, and the copy has a higher likelihood of living far longer than you.

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