That’s not necessarily true. Even though the machine has a complete copy of your data, that doesn’t mean we understand how it works. For an analogy:

Just a quick point: periods of dreamless sleep happen in between dreaming sections, too.

Don’t you have periods during sleep where you don’t dream?

The brain might be doing maintenance, but the consciousness isn’t “running”. It’s like a computer doing its self-diagnostics during a restart. The hardware’s doing work, but the OS hasn’t started yet.

Heh, I remember that one. I take the opposite approach to the guy in the comic, though. Anything with my state and memories is “me”, regardless of how it got that state and memories. Continuity of memory is what matters, not continuity of consciousness.

That’s almost what she’s saying. She’s saying that the pattern of particles that makes up “you” directly produces your consciousness, and therefore if you copy the pattern, you copy the consciousness. If the pattern stops existing/being executed temporarily, (i.e. during dreamless sleep) “you” stop existing for that…

Actually, there exist lossless compression algorithms. They can take most (not all, Pidgeonhole Principle, but almost all) bitstrings and convert them into shorter forms, with repetitive data being the best for compression. (Our bodies are very repetitive on the atomic level, and all information can be represented as…

It would also be fallacious. As a programmer, I occasionally run into impossible requests. Not “impossible”, as in “Build a heavier-than-air flying machine (before the Wright Bros)”, not “impossible”, as in “write me a program that can beat a Go grandmaster and run on my watch, and you have 10 days to do it”, but…

In this context, affect is correct. Effect is a verb only when used to mean “to bring about”, which doesn’t fit in this context.

Saying “atoms” is simplified. What’s actually being copied is all particles, along with their current state (velocity, charge, spin, etc.). That would catch all electrical signals (flowing electrons/charged particles/charged atoms) as well.

Sure, matter can’t be destroyed. Patterns can. If I took a brain and randomized the atoms inside without preserving a copy of the original structure, then it essentially couldn’t be reassembled, and the person is essentially permanently dead. Your consciousness is in the pattern, not the atoms.

Magic. Or, rather, Sci-fi’s magic: technobabble. Star Trek never put much thought into making sure the physics worked. It makes for good stories, but bad things to base your understanding of science on.

Yep, that’s pure technobabble. I knew it as soon as matter getting “bound to energy” was mentioned. No possible real-world-physics explanation exists.

In your photo-voltaic cell question, the correct answer is “no”, because different photons at different frequencies are emitted than were absorbed. There is a measurable difference. It’s the same energy, though.

Both. My “self”, that which I call “me”, is in both the original body and the computer. The two diverge after an instant, but they both have equal claim to being the “original”, which is a meaningless term.

If consciousness doesn’t come from the summation of all the particles that make up “you”, plus their interactions, plus their entanglements, plus any other undiscovered physical mechanism that permits particles to affect other particles, then it’s magic. Scientists don’t understand consciousness, but we still rule out…

Then there would be 100 “me”s. I’m perfectly OK with the notion of a plurality of selves. (Although they would be identical for an instant only; their diverging experiences would set them apart from each other.

No, then there are two “me”s, the one that was created and the one that was copied from. Both have continuity (a property of the “software” of consciousness) with the original, one just happens to have a body (hardware, not software) that was created recently. (Technically, the “original”’s body has “hardware…

That’s a false analogy. “Nigh-on perfect” is not perfect, and “guaranteed neither your family nor friends could tell the difference” is not “contains a perfect copy of your current state, including all memories”. I object to the first one because there is still only one “me”, the one who dies. In the second one, there…

Hello! I’m the one who is (conditionally) OK with the final point!