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Uploading your consciousness to a machine wouldn't really extend your lifespan. Think of it like moving a file from one device to another; the file isn't actually moved, you just get a copy on the second device. You and your digital clone will also begin to diverge immediately as the lived experience of being a new digital entity would be different from continuing life as a meat person.
The closest you can get is to Ship of Theseus it; get a machine implant which gradually takes over brain functions as cells die or parts of the brain fail. Single stream of consciousness in a single body, now fully digitised. Incidentally this is also closer to biological processes to replace cells, though the brain cells renew much less frequently then other cell types. I think some areas don't naturally get replaced over a lifetime too but I'm not certain on that, either way you'd want to go faster than natural cell replacement.
Alternatively you could make the transfer process dissolve your meat brain. Personally I'd say you are dead and your clone lives on but its the same argument as Star Trek style transporters; the clone still feels like it's you so if they got to where you want to go does it really matter?
Yup, mind uploading is making a copy. If the copying process is destruct, that doesn’t make it less of a copy. Your copy would remember your decision, so it will know it’s a copy as long as it knew how the process works.
But your mind already operates this way. Human consciousness is naturally discontinuous. Your consciousness is essentially a program that runs on the hardware of your mind. And your consciousness is not a continuous thing. If you've ever been sedated for a surgery, you'll know that when you're sedated, you are just gone. You don't dream. You don't drift. You just don't exist for however long you are under. The experience of sedation is the experience of death.
And beyond that, your consciousness ceases every time you go to sleep. Yes, there are some periods of the sleep cycle, such as REM sleep, where your consciousness is active in an odd state. But there are others where again, no one is home. There are periods of every night where your conscious mind ceases to exist entirely.
"You," a conscious mind experiencing the universe, exist for less than a day. Tomorrow a new version of you will be spun up to experience the world, including all of your memories. But the you of your current conscious self will cease to exist this very night.
If I go to sleep, and instead of a new copy of my consciousness springing up tomorrow in my body, a copy activates on a computer, is that still me? Really, I don't see why not. Both would have my full memories. Both would have my personality. Neither would be a direct continuation of my conscious experience. Ultimately, they're both copies of my current conscious self.
I will not live past today. I, you, and every other human consciousness exist but for a single day (in normal sleep conditions.) We exist in a chain of such iotas of life, the self of each day passing the torch to the self of the next. Each self is united only by shared memory. That is how every human consciousness experiences life.
Everyone wonders if uploading your mind to a machine will extend your lifespan. What they should be wondering is if waking up each morning does the same.
Try to make the most of each day. Remember, you only get one.
I believe you are right. I should've been clearer in my original post, but I was envisioning getting the memories/upload state into the brain of the new body, not staying as a digital copy. My thought was that if you included memories up until the moment of death for your original self that it could be a semblance of "seamless continuation" because the clone would indeed think it is the original. However, at best, like you pointed out, it isn't so much extension of life as replacement.
In the scheme of things, my preferences for life extension tech methods in order of "preserving the original" would be: organ replacement -> nanobots/gene tweaks -> cyborgization -> cryonics -> mind uploading to a new body
I suppose a matter replicator could advance tech in each area to make them more likely to occur though given that research would no longer have material constraints.