I’ve been watching the TV series Pantheon and I really like it, but this tiny aspect is something I can’t quite grasp. So these people have their minds uploaded to the cloud - and they make a point to state that they’re still “them” - alive, real, authentic. But would it really be like that? The process is brain mapping, so essentially they just make a perfect clone of your brain/mind and run it digitally. But it’s still just a simulation. A perfect clone is still just a clone. The original person is gone. I don’t see the “continuity” aspect.
I don’t think existence of the original matters unless you postulate the existence of something non-physical like a soul that can transfer over to the familiar copy if the original is destroyed, or split into two when both exist. Physically, a copy is a copy which might feel like “you”, but if the original is destroyed, the original “you” dies.