My life and my consciousness is a continuous, ongoing, self-sustaining process. If you make a copy of me, that is a different instance of that process.
An analogy can be made between two instances of a program running on a computer, or two instances of a particular class in OO programming.
Ultimately, all of my values reduce to physical pain and pleasure and the anticipation of my continued and increasing ability to experience more pleasure than pain. Sure, I have lots of higher-level, "spiritual" values, but the underlying biological process is what makes those possible. I have no biological or higher-level (rational) reason to care about a different instance of my body and consciousness. I only care about this one.
When I go to sleep, I am putting my conscious mental life on hold, but not my physical life. And I know that my concsiousness will resume in a few hours when I wake up. So making a copy of yourself and killing the original is not obviously analogous to sleeping.
That is the whole misconception I am trying to get rid of. There is no "this one". It would be like if you are a program running on a computer, and you move the entire program from one spot of the memory in RAM, to another. You could also save it to disk and then put it back later. It makes no difference to the user or the program or anything. The concept of "this" doesn't even make sense in terms of information like a computer program. A copy of some information is the same information.
You could also move your head around in space. And yet you are still the same person, are you not? How would it make any difference if you deleted all the atoms in your head and moved them a slight amount to the left. Or deleted all the bits in RAM and moved them to a different place.
An analogy can be made between two instances of a program running on a computer, or two instances of a particular class in OO programming.
Ultimately, all of my values reduce to physical pain and pleasure and the anticipation of my continued and increasing ability to experience more pleasure than pain. Sure, I have lots of higher-level, "spiritual" values, but the underlying biological process is what makes those possible. I have no biological or higher-level (rational) reason to care about a different instance of my body and consciousness. I only care about this one.
When I go to sleep, I am putting my conscious mental life on hold, but not my physical life. And I know that my concsiousness will resume in a few hours when I wake up. So making a copy of yourself and killing the original is not obviously analogous to sleeping.