Futurist, explorer, dreamer, and Neatorama pal Cliff Pickover has just released a new novel called The Heaven Virus:
In the The Heaven Virus, technology is sufficiently advanced that we can upload our minds to a virtual reality run on a computing device. Given this technology, would you personally take the ultimate plunge? In The Heaven Virus, the latest Afterlife chip has computational limitations—it can only realistically simulate a small environment like an indoor shopping mall. But the simulation is extremely accurate. Even the movement of water in the fountains is faithfully rendered. Your simulacrum would experience reality, free from disease and disability, living forever.
Cliff asks:
Would you choose to be uploaded upon your death if you could never leave the artificial mall? Could you be happy there? E-mail me your answers.
It's what creeped me out about the Star Trek transporter story "Spock Must Die" when I was a kid.
Basically, the book said that the transporter doesn't actually transmit matter across space, but transmits the pattern of that matter. The receiving end simply assembles a new version of you, while the old version of you is destroyed at the original end. Sure, you can be reassembled, but they're not your original molecules, nor your original electrons and neurons and stuff coursing through your brains and veins. Those were destroyed.
Ergo, you are killed while a copy lives on, identical to the original you in every way.
Same thing. You can upload a copy, but you really ought to transfer the original, and that would be something really tricky - are your thoughts, your brain waves, your soul irrevocably tied to the physical construct which is your brain, or can you separate your "essence" into another vessel?