You upload your brain, and what do you know! You've made a copy of yourself in a box.

There should be a German word for that feeling you get when you're sitting there in your wheelchair with six weeks to live and that box says "Wow. That's better!" in your voice. Consciousness, the sense of yourself behind your eyeballs, is still a mystery, but I bet a dollar you can't pump it down a wire.

Both of you will insist that it's "you." Both of you would be right. If you downloaded simultaneously into two boxes, you would have an interesting philosophical problem. There is no objective way to tell from the outside if you are really self-conscious, or just a simulation. Of course, when you think about it, this is true for normal humans, too.

I suspect some societies will solve this problem by just killing the original in the process. Problem solved, and no way to ever prove you've rendered a consciousness extinct and replaced it with a copy.

If I lived in the Star Trek universe, you wouldn't catch me going into a transporter either.