I've been wondering about mind uploading. If our mind can be fully uploaded to a non-biological operating platform, and we do invent the necessary hardware requirements to house one, what will that machine have to do to convince a user to adopt it? If the subjective experience remains fundamentally private and unique, how could uploading be anything but a leap of faith?

I read a short story about a man with a crystal in his head that learned to think like he did matching him thought for thought, then one day his arm choose a banana when he wanted an apple and he realized he was the crystal all along just now being severed from the host system. Essentially two people are being created when the mind adopts another house, or we are going to have to change what it means to be a person. That crystal realized that he wasn't the original, that his memories are implants, his thought patterns are implants, his personality is an implant. Needless to say an identity crisis would ensue, but a most interesting one. Would he care? Would he necessarily react as if the original person came to this conclusion? Would he be compelled to establish his own identity by rebelling against his own thoughts and acting contrary to his implanted self or accept the identity he's been given? In this context, what can we say constitutes a person? If memories and character traits and the inner life can be duplicated, the self becomes less solid and more malleable. Is the self just a collection of neural behaviors a mechanical system carries and nothing more? Self-Esteem then is the value the system places on having a certain behavior or collection of behaviors.

The machine would understand this to a degree the original would not. The new person machine would begin sampling the gamut of personality, but what criteria could it go by in forming its new self if authenticity is meaningless. Would it have to choose its behaviors based on social function? Subjective inner pleasure? Or would we simply see the implanted personality begin to evolve at a greater speed?

This is getting off topic, but what would this machine mean for ethics? Am I responsible for all the actions of my copied personalities? Or are only the individual mechanical systems that performed the action? What about interconnected bodies constantly updating and sharing my person, selectively adopting new test traits, separating and reforming whenever necessary or benificial? Aren't we already in this situation when we refer to being a part of society, adopting cultures, living and learning from the individual lives of each other? Or even within our own brain hemispheres continually feeding back into each other's processes?

What do we gain from holding onto our individual identities as solid, immutable, and singular? What do we lose?