Would a Perfect Copy of Me Still Be Me?

Imagine a machine that reproduces your memories, character and manner of speaking. The copy wakes convinced that it is you. It may be exactly like you, but is it numerically the same person?

In Book II, Chapter XXVII of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke connects personal identity with the reach of consciousness into the past. This makes memory and psychological continuity important, but it does not settle the problem of copying. Parfit later used fission cases to show why: if one person’s psychology continues in two successors, both cannot be numerically identical with the original, because one person cannot become two people who are distinct from each other. Parfit therefore argued that what matters in practice may be psychological continuity and connectedness rather than identity in the strict sense.

My view is that a perfect copy could preserve the informational structure of a person without copying the one continuous history that has actually occurred. Before the copying, the two share the same narratable past. Afterwards, their bodily locations, experiences and choices immediately diverge. The copy is not a fake. It is a new subject that possesses your past and begins forming a history of its own.

This thought experiment is not a prediction about real technology. Its value is that it separates being extremely similar from being one and the same, and shows why preserving memories is not automatically the same as transferring a person.

References
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II
https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/authors/locke
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Personal Identity
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-personal/