I think the biggest thing people leave out is even if it did work. How do you know it would be you? It could just be a copy of you. It could think its you, it could have your memories, it could look like you, talk like you, and smell like you. But it would be a leap of faith to assume it would be you for all we know the person dies when you try to hook them up to this Avatar and then just an emulation of that person could remain. And no one would ever know. So forget being mourned.
Its easy to get tangled in the philosophical implications, but its important to note that on a physical level you aren't even the same you from last year, or even last hour. Until you can answer the question of whether you are absolutely certain you are the same you that you were when to went to bed last night
in whatever way you feel is most meaningful, this question is essentially meaningless (personally: legally its a different story).
I'm reminded of a conversation I had with someone over the concept of a Star Trek-like transporter. He asked the question how any such device could put every single particle of your body back together in exactly the precise configuration when quantum mechanics says that's impossible - not just technologically impossible, but literally impossible. And I asked the more important counter-question: how does
the universe do that when you walk across the room? Answer: it does not. Quantum mechanics dictates that the subatomic particles that make up your body cannot stay in a precise configuration because quantum mechanics forbids it. And yet you still exist. That's because most variations of your quantum state produce a person indistinguishable from each other.
Continuity of existence is really an illusion, a classical approximation to the discontinuity of quantum mechanics. But if that illusion is the one reality we can ever experience, does it matter that its an illusion? Its a truism that the only reality we can perceive is perceivable reality.
Which brings up probably the most epistemologically twisted aspect of this subject. We don't experience the past, we only remember it. So we cannot base our sense of continuous existence on the past, but only our memories of the past. So the question becomes, if you are told that you are a construct and your memories are not your own but granted to you by a technological process, in what way would that be distinguishable from the alternative? If its impossible to tell the difference, is that a distinction with any real meaning?
