Comment by knpstr on Your transhuman copy is of questionable value to your meat self. · 2016-01-21T21:23:46.907Z · LW · GW

At best the argument you're making is the same as "a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" argument.

If I have a back-up of my computer software on a different hard drive and the current hard drive fails so I swap in the back up... my computer performs the same but it is obviously a different hard drive.

If my hard drive doesn't fail and I simply "write over" my current hard drive with the hard drive back up, it is still not the same hard drive/software. It will be easy to forget it has been copied and is not the original, but the original (or last version) is gone and has been written over, despite it being "the same".