Comment by alexwebb2

> So if your brain was somehow cloned, you'd exist in two places at the same time?

There’d be two Mes – two instantiations of the Me pattern co-occurring. And that would likely be confusing for both of us!

> To illustrate, two instances of a programs can share the exact same binary code (the "pattern") and yet they are separate instances.

Exactly! If we suspend a Docker image, transfer it to a new compatible host machine, and fire it up, we consider it a resumption of the same process (pattern) in a different instance.

Likewise, say we found a mathematical function that would compute the entire state of that Docker image at that moment, and then wiped the image – such that there was no current physical instantiation of it anywhere, on any machine – and subsequently used the function to regenerate it bit for bit.

A dualist would say there’s something fundamentally different about the human analogue of that; that the Mind has a separate existence Elsewhere – and not just in the mathematical sense of patterns not requiring instantiation to still be patterns, since that would apply to all patterns, Minds or not.