Reddit reviews Time Frame (Split Second Book 2)

If they made a simulation of me while I am still alive, then it would be like suddenly having an identical twin living in the computer. Our lives had been identical up to that point, but at the instant the scan was taken, our personal subjective timelines began to diverge. If you were the emulation, then to you, this would seem like being in the scanning apparatus, and then suddenly being somewhere else (as a simulation). The "somewhere else" could be in a high-fidelity virtual environment (like a holodeck. Who knows? maybe meat people could plug in and visit you there.), or in an android body running a brain emulation of your scan. There are examples of this in science fiction that would do a better job explaining what this would be like if it really happened. The two examples that come to mind are the Star Trek: TNG episode "Second Chances" (Wikipedia article for the episode - WARNING SPOILERS) and a recently-published near-future technothriller called Time Frame (Amazon Kindle Link). These are both fiction, obviously, but I find science fiction to be helpful in situations like this because it can provide a frame of reference for discussing things outside our normal daily experience but which might someday be possible. It's important to note that both of you would definitely still be alive for a while. If you were the emulation, and then the biological version died, you would feel sad in the same way that you would feel sad if you had an identical twin brother/sister and he/she died. So in the event that an emulation is created before legal death of the source material (the "bio-you") (or in any such circumstances where one or more versions can keep accruing separate subjective experience), then to discard either of them would be murder in a pragmatic sense. If you had an EM created while you were alive (let's say, in your 30s) and then you died when you were 80, you would still want your 80-year-old brain to be scanned and made into an EM as well. Otherwise, the EM from age 30 would mourn the loss of his/her brother/sister like the death of a sibling. Once the scan of the deceased 80-year-old complete and the EM is online, there would still only be two because there was no opportunity for subjective experience to diverge between the biological and emulated versions.


That said, there's also the scenario where future technology might allow frequent "backups" that are never actually instantiated unless the original dies. I was first introduced to this concept when it was explored in Peter F. Hamilton's excellent Commonwealth series. Well worth a read, especially Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained.