Maybe. There's plenty of science fiction that addresses this. For example the "meths" (short for Methuselah) in altered carbon, who achieve immortality by making backups of their brains that can be spawned to cloned bodies. You could recover from accidents, or roll back to before the obscure disease kicked in
It might look like immortality to outside observers, but I don't see how it is the same thing
Any process that could theoretically allow me to exist at the same time as my future self must clearly not be me anymore
So any kind if "mind backup" is a copy. A clone with a copy of my memories absolutely cannot be me. We would somehow need to be able to transfer my consciousness into a clone body
It seems very likely to me that consciousness is actually a side effect of a physical network in the brain and cannot actually be separated from the biological brain to move to an artificial brain
In the Altered Carbon world there are strict laws against “double sleeving”, but it happens whenever the plot benefits.
One character has an entire island of populated exclusively by herself.
They never go into why it’s illegal. I think it’s implied they know a copy isn’t the original, but they don’t want to think about it. Too unpleasant an idea.
