In “Old Man’s War” they explain their mind uploading to a new improved body by a short moment where you feel like you’re in both bodies at once. Basically if you can synchronize both consciousnesses you can terminate the old one without it feeling like your existence is ending, because you exist in two places at once. That’s kind of what most episodes about the transporter suggest too, that you’re conscious during the transfer, and consciousness exists outside of the “physical” world.

Since that’s not possible in the real world, mind uploading would mean death too. The only way mind uploading can work for human minds is if you’d slowly alter the brain synapse by synapse (say over months or years) and slowly upgrade your brain and turn it into a computer without there being any determinable break in consciousness. You still couldn’t beam your mind to Saturn and back at lightspeed though.

In The Culture series they address the problem of cloned minds send into android bodies that it’s possible to reintegrate two consciousnesses back into one. But only if they both agree to it.

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