Solid article, but the argument just isn't there to back up the assertion.

I contend that you are. Your brain activity never ceases, even while under deep anesthesia, or after, say, being choked unconscious (as I have been on the Brazilian Jiu Jitsu mats, under controlled settings).

I have to wonder if whoever wrote this article has ever experienced either of these things before. First off, it's not as though one is a stand in for the other. They are both very different forms of unconsciousness. In physical unconsciousness, there's literally brain damage, lost information, that the person emerging on the other side has to deal with.

The biggest problem I have with this argument is the reliance of what I like to call "the self defined you". If you define "yourself" from your own specific, momentary frame of reference, you'll never truly break out of the evolved "dead is dead", "sleep is safe" mentality.

Imagine that we get to the point with nanotechnology where it's possible to eliminate sleep in a person. They never have to sleep, never have to turn in for the night. A person raised under these conditions, never having slept before, never having considered what it must feel like to sleep, would view it in very much the same way as we view death.

You could make arguments about how there is still some brain activity during sleep, and how in most cases, the person wakes up and feels fine in the next morning. I would counter with a similar argument applies to death, and if you have the same information, the same pattern of the original brain, it's no different from "waking a person" up.

It's easy to get caught up in thinking about perfect clones and teleporters and what not, but these all rely on a certain shock value. My argument is that yes, a perfect clone would be you, until differentiated by entropy. But you are also only you for the brief moment you think you are, and then you become a different "you". Our definitions of self are currently limited by what our technology can do. We can't bring people's patterns back from the dead, that's why most of the arguments against perfect teleporters involve death in some way (what if your clone survived for ten seconds, then you died, etc.)