"Sim-me may live in sim-Manhattan with other uploaded minds, but with my personality and memories, he will love my family just as I do and will want to interact with them."

"Sim-me will have the same political views and want to vote; he will have the same intellectual interests and want to return to the job he remembers and still loves. He'll want to be part of the world. And what would stop him? He may live in the cloud, with a simulated instead of a physical body, but his leverage on the real world would be as good as anyone else's. We already live in a world where almost everything we do flows through cyberspace. We keep up with friends and family through text and Twitter, Facebook and Skype. We keep informed about the world through social media and internet news. Even our jobs, some of them at least, increasingly exist in an electronic space.... [W]ho would accumulate the most power? One possible answer is the people who live in the simulated world. They've already built a lifetime of political and economic connections.... Biological people would become a larval stage of human, each of them aspiring to be among the lucky few who are allowed to metamorphose into the immortal elites who own the world.... [T]he most powerful people [might] be those who control access to the simulated world. Think about how religions work. People at the top tell you that if you behave well, you'll enter heaven, and if you behave badly, you may end up in eternal punishment.... [R]eligious demagogues offer an afterlife that can't be objectively confirmed.... Imagine the coercive power of an afterlife that is directly confirmable. The public could Skype with people who are in a digital heaven and (if the technology turns very dark) in a digital hell...."

From "Will Your Uploaded Mind Still Be You?/The day is coming when we will be able to scan our entire consciousness into a computer. How will we coexist with our digital replicas?" by Michael S.A. Graziano (in the WSJ).

Graziano has an upcoming book, "Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience." I don't know if the book has anything on the subject of law, but the column doesn't. It's a very interesting column, but I can't read things like "his leverage on the real world would be as good as anyone else's" without thinking about law. I suspect that experts on the brain and consciousness will see many other problems with what he's saying. One of the commenters at the link brings up hormones. I don't see how copying all the connections in the brain would produce a consciousness that's the same as what a mind in an entire body experiences.