How "reincarnation" might work?

[Ben Davis]

Why is having a separate consciousness so important to defining oneself?

It's simply is the only way to define an individual's subjective awareness. You know that you are you and not anyone else; you don't see out of anyone else's eyes, think anyone else's thoughts.

A copy's identity is mostly potential. If you split up and had different experience you *would* indeed become more different.

'Identity' can be described in 2 ways, from internal or external perspectives. Externally, if a copy's good enough/identical, the identity would be considered the same at the point of copying but from then on would diverge with increasing variance over time due to subjective experience. Internally, it doesn't matter how good the copy is, identity is not shared; each subjective awareness would be individual.

If you did not separate and develop as separate beings with different experiences and instead could somehow share all knowledge over time it would be difficult to distinguish you apart. One could answer a question asked by the other.

Only from an external perspective. Internally, each being would be aware that they are themselves and not the other.

In and of it's self having separate consciousnesses doesn't *do* anything.

I disagree. It's fundamental to understand that the individual subjective awareness is the sole internal quantification of identity.

And as i said it's "reincarnation" in quotes.

And my point is it's not reincarnation in the sense that reincarnation is sold to us: it's not a continuance of 'you', it's an emergence of a completely new and separate subjective awareness. 'You' still die and your awareness ceases to exist. In some ways, being continued by a clone could be considered worse than simply dying in that an impostor takes your place, steals your friends, your lovers, your children; you're supplanted rather than continuing. That would stick hard in the craw of many people.