What makes a person? "You" is the product of a unique set of experiences and some genes.

Each time you experience something new you are not exactly the same person as you were before. You stop existing all the time without even noticing it.

Uploading with a shared consciousness as you describe it would certainly create the illusion that your personality would stay unaltered, but you can never be sure. You might have the same memories as before, but once some new are added, like the experience of being uploaded and feeling what it is like to be immortal, you are simply not the same anymore.

There is one way around it though, you could be uploaded into a simulation that equals your old enviroment. It could be a solution for when earth becomes unlinhabitable for some reason, but still if I got the chance of living in another reality I'd prefer one that was better then the one I am leaving behind.

Is that bad? I don't think so. Trying to stay the same all the time is a rather... em... conservative? goal.

There's a thin line between believing you are and believing you aren't. On the one extreme you could easily fall into a depression contemplating - and realizing - you are always a changed human the very next minute. On the other extreme you could sedate yourself into a buddist-like delerium believing all humans to be one and the same and it all makes no difference if you live or die. Those are the extremes - but there is a thin line seperating those extremes.

In the end, when you have any residu of wilpower, and when you know you are dying, you will resist it. Many people have resisted death through spawning children (a choice that doesn't work for me). Many more enjoy elaborate fantasies about a life after death in the context of a religion. Other people have found other solutions, one more abstract than the other. But in the end many billions will simply have to face the likelyhood that what you are going to be erased, based mostly on the whims of nature.

I think there is a good 25% chance everyone of reasonable health, living in the richer countries, will enjoy some sort of life extension. The amount of life extension will range from several years (very likely) to several decades (likely) to a century (less likely) and longer, in some form or another, (very unlikely).

Just try to envision a mystical AI data projecting, at any moment, a graph in the corner of your vision, where you could see the odds of that actually happening. You would see, visualized in a neat colorful diagram, the percentile odds of you living another 10, 20, 50, 100 or 1000 years. I leave those odds your imagination, hope or intuition.

However you'd see that decissions such as lighting a cigarette, eating a burger at your favorite fast food restaurant, moving to a more densely population area, voting republican, etc. would adversely affect the odds on your stat. You'd see every life's decission affecting your odds. Good thing is many people will see interesting fluctations in those graphs.

What a simple graph would not show, was the nature of your prolonged life. You may live an extra 40 over the average life expectancy of 75, connected to tubes in some hospital. You could live another 2000 years, most of which inhabiting a niche as scavenger in a meta-ecology inhabited by transcendant and vastly disinterested A.I.s. You may see yourself uploaded, multiplied into many copies, those copies edited, spliced, patched, merged with other copies, subsumed, resold, reintegrated with human bodies in the vast future, copyrighted, enslaved, used as articles of entertainment or abuse. You would have to consider all the implications of uploading.

However there is one vast fundamental point you make in your article; you have little or no alternative.

An average rather dimwitted human being in our consumer society has the prospect of raising a family, becoming granddad, smiling at his grandchildren, dying and leaving a fat inheritance. That's all most people know, expect and hope for. That's the current average prognosis. Most people patch the holes up with some religion.

However you are not most people. You, like me, have tasted the sour life has to offer. You know human bodies fairly often suck. You know life extension, upgrading, uploading (or whatever technology may have to offer to patch things up) is substantially better than your current expectations.

Your choices have little effect on your graph. Your chances have been constrained. You already know this existence is flawed. You and I know and hope it can only get better.

What the respondents don't seem to comprehend is that his fear is not that his mind will seem different to himself after the upload. He is not fearing that the color blue will seem more purplish than it used to , or that he will enjoy math more or less than he used to. He is afraid that he will stop experiencing everything and die, while some computer starts to mimic his behavior so his relatives believe that he is still experiencing things through the computer. He is also afraid that it might turn out that the computer acts like him and actually has someone experiencing sensations like his used to be, but that the new person will be someone else who has the same memories he used to have.
Even if the new person believes that he was always Matthew, that does not make it true. He is afraid that THe real matthew will be dead and experience nothing, while some new being will start getting perceptions and falsely believe that he used to be and still is Matthew.

We have mind uploading and downloading today; PDA. I have a palm t3 and it is my portable brain, regardless of advances, I will be able to pass my portable brain to my kids, and some of the information will be relevent. We have the technology today, what we DO NOT have is complete correction and complete automation.

If I have a serious infection, and I get prescription antibiotics for my problem, and I do not die at age 8, 16, 24, 56, 92? We are performing life extention all of the time. As we enter the singularity, we will have serious advances in the quality and quanity of options.

The problem then becomes access, and the book "The Age of Access" is a good introduction to the access problem.

We have mind uploading and downloading today; PDA. I have a palm t3 and it is my portable brain, regardless of advances, I will be able to pass my portable brain to my kids, and some of the information will be relevent. We have the technology today, what we DO NOT have is complete correction and complete automation.

If I have a serious infection, and I get prescription antibiotics for my problem, and I do not die at age 8, 16, 24, 56, 92? We are performing life extention all of the time. As we enter the singularity, we will have serious advances in the quality and quanity of options.

The problem then becomes access, and the book "The Age of Access" is a good introduction to the access problem.

The aim is to repair the body and restore or bring it to an optimal state. You'd still be "you," just as a person cured of some illness is still the same.
As to uploading someone, I seriously doubt that will be feasible any time soon. When it is, would it be more or less like a religious conversion or the difference between people I've seen scooting along on wheeled platforms and those with functioning artificial legs? Probably.