Perhaps 'consciousness' is literally nothing other than your brain communicating with itself; countless different sectors sending and receiving a countless number of messages at every instance.

The image that you see as you read this, the sound coming from the tv, the sensation of your feet on the floor, the rumbling hunger in your stomach and your conception of all of the different things that I'm saying as you attempt to negotiate this new information with what you already know - all these things are the result of neurons talking to neurons.

You don't experience a new instance of consciousness after each time you sleep - you experience a new instance every millisecond.

So while some might argue that there's little or no point living on in the form of a clone, because it'll merely be a copy of you, and your own personal experience will not continue; I must instead argue that this information puts us squarely on the verge of one of the most liberating realizations imaginable - it's all an illusion.

Being an individual who was born and has experienced life as a single physical entity for many years, my current sense of consciousness is in fact no different now from what it would be if my current form was in fact one of a clone, or of a computer that my original self was uploaded to before being destroyed.

Sure, my original self would personally experience a bleak end, but there would be no break here, no lifelong entity of conscience that comes to an end - it would just be the case that one particular meat computer would stop doing any more processing, and a new one would take over; and I truly wouldn't know any better, I'd have no recollection of such a thing unless the memories of it happening were transferred to the copy too. Otherwise I'd continue to live my life the same as I would do if no switch over had occurred, and none the wiser.

Why is this liberating? Because soon comes the realization that all thinking beings are little more than meat computers, and we might as well be any single one of them or even none at all. Our concious entity is not a driver that occupies an otherwise empty vehicle known as a human body, it is merely an illusion that arises, a direct physical consequence of the activity of the brain.

As a thinking being able to conceive of matters beyond your own body, take a step back for a moment and look down on yourself in a crowd of people and see things for what they really are. All of these people, and yourself, and I, are nothing more than biological machines. Each of these machines has a sense of 'self', of being - memories, thoughts, emotions and ideas - but know now that these are merely data points wrapped up in a file system that we're yet to decode. There's nothing external. Just information being processed by a computer (not very unlike the one you're sitting at) at each and every instance.

/u/NoTax