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Notes -
Relevant sarcastic comment by qtnm in the comments of Lena:
All instances of people caring about other people in history, so far, have happened under the assumption that any given person could, in theory, be in another person's place.
The horror of Lena is that this assumption is destroyed. The technology is mind copying, not mind transfer. Every single person who is scanned will go inside the facility and will come out. There is no mechanism to shift perspective, ever: the material and the digital substrates never cross directly. If you experience living in reality now (as opposed to remembering it), by induction you can be sure that you will never experience living as an em.
Ever.
This puts the suffering of ems at a greater distance than even the suffering of animals, for a person could fathom a timeline where, but for the grace of God, he lives the life of cattle. None such mechanism to facilitate empathy would exist for copying scans. They would be as fictional characters, whose suffering evokes vivid emotions in many but never a desire to stop it by refusing to create fiction.
I have a dim opinion of the Rawlsian veil of ignorance, but even so, there are a million issues with such claims.
This claim implicitly but load-bearingly assumes that a post-Singularity civilization won't have the ability to create simulations indistinguishable from reality.
Even today, we have no actual rebuttal for the Simulation Hypothesis. You and I could be simulations inside a simulation, but it's a possibility we can't prove or exclude at the moment, so the sensible thing to do is to ignore it and move on with our lives.
Even if you did start out as a Real Human, then I think that with the kind of mind editing in Lena, it would be trivial to make you forget or ignore that fact.
Further, I don't think continuity of consciousness is a big deal, which is why I don't have nightmares about going to take a nap. As far as I'm concerned, my "mind" is a pattern that can be instantiated in just about any form of compute, but at the moment is in a biological computer. There is no qualitative change in the process of mind upload, at least a high fidelity one, be it a destructive scan or preserving of the original brain.
And if that was true about us, then your opinion or mine considering the ethics of mind emulation would be utterly irrelevant. Not to mention that it wouldn't be the world of Lena, exactly. The entire point of Lena is that the simulation is very different from reality, in the worse direction.
I think your true belief in what counts as death will be revealed once death starts breathing down your current biophysical instantiation's neck, and conflating deep sleep with death will not look so convincing.
If continuity of consciousness isn't a big deal then we can forget the assumption that consciousness is tied to specific mind patterns at all. Maybe one second you're self_made_human, and another second you're Katy Perry, and the next second yet is spent in a nascent Boltzmann brain halfway across the observed universe.
If we didn't know for a fact that we are/aren't in a simulation, it remains entirely applicable. Besides, my entire point is that Lena isn't an accurate prediction of what the world will look like given its current trajectory.
That doesn't follow, when I temporarily lose continuity of consciousness, I wake up more or less the same person. I don't even perceive the gap, sleeping is pretty much an IRL time skip. That's because the underlying pattern of embodied cognition is minimally affected in the process.
In what meaningful way can the "same" person be me and then Katy Perry? The word "same" becomes entirely meaningless.
A butterfly can't actually dream of being human.
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