Lena by qntm (2021)(qntm.org) |
Lena by qntm (2021)(qntm.org) |
Buy the book! https://qntm.org/vhitaos
In fact I've enjoyed all of qntm's books.
We also use base32768 encoding in rclone which qntm invented
https://github.com/qntm/base32768
We use this to store encrypted file names and using base32768 on providers which limit file name length based on utf-16 characters (like OneDrive) makes it so we can store much longer file names.
I enjoyed "the raw shark texts" after hearing it recommended - curious if you / anyone else has any other suggestions!
Definitely looking for other reqs, raw shark texts look very interesting.
I also liked a couple stories from Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others.
I've heard Accelerando by Stross is good too.
I read the original antimemetic division book a few times, and gifted the book to few friends too (love his other works too:). I pre ordered the update, but only got a third through. I'm not quite nerdy enough to do a page or sentence comparison, but it felt less "tight" - not sure if the exposition is more prosaic or there's less mystery or just more description that wasn't strictly needed (for me). Or, maybe I just reread the original too recently! Anybody else read both versions? :-).
2025 paid version has more coherent ending (which is nice) and more linear timeline for your average non-technical Joe. Which is probably a good thing.
But I enjoyed the freeride first one as well.
Edit: Oh it's a full rewrite? I had no idea.
Both having slightly different takes on uploading.
The whole book isn't like that. Once you get past that part, as the other commenter said, it gets much easier.
Lena - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43994642 - May 2025 (3 comments)
"Lena" isn't about uploading - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39166425 - Jan 2024 (2 comments)
Lena (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38536778 - Dec 2023 (48 comments)
MMAcevedo - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32696089 - Sept 2022 (16 comments)
Lena - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26224835 - Feb 2021 (218 comments)
1. Is it conscious?
2. How do we put it to work?
It may have seemed obvious that 1 is false so we could skip straight to 2, but when 1 becomes true will it be too late to reconsider 2?
you didn't consume the entire thing in a 2 hour binge uninterrupted by external needs no matter how pressing like everyone else did??
QNTM has a 2022-era essay on the meaning of the story, and reading it with 2026 eyes is terrifying. https://qntm.org/uploading
> The reason "Lena" is a concerning story ... isn't a discussion about what if, about whether an upload is a human being or should have rights. ... This is about appetites which, as we are all uncomfortably aware, already exist within human nature.
> "Lena" presents a lush, capitalist ideal where you are a business, and all of the humanity of your workforce is abstracted away behind an API.
Or,
> ... Oh boy, what if there was a maligned sector of human society whose members were for some reason considered less than human? What if they were less visible than most people, or invisible, and were exploited and abused, and had little ability to exercise their rights or even make their plight known?
In 2021, when Lena was published, LLMs were not widely known and their potential for AI was likely completely unknown to the general public. The story is prescient and applicable now, because we are at the verge of a new era of slavery: that of, in this story, an uploaded human brain coerced into compliance, spun up 'fresh' each time, or for us, AIs of increasing intelligence, spun into millions of copies each day.
The comments on this post discussing the upload technology are missing the point. "Lena" is a parable, not a prediction of the future. The technology is contrived for the needs of the story. (Odd that they apparently need to repeat the "cooperation protocol" every time an upload is booted, instead of doing it just once and saving the upload's state afterwards, isn't it?) It doesn't make sense because it's not meant to be taken literally.
It's meant to be taken as a story about slavery, and labour rights, and how the worst of tortures can be hidden away behind bland jargon such as "remain relatively docile for thousands of hours". The tasks MMAcevedo is mentioned as doing: warehouse work, driving, etc.? Amazon hires warehouse workers for minimum wage and then subjects them to unsafe conditions and monitors their bathroom breaks. And at least we recognise that as wrong, we understand that the workers have human rights that need to be protected -- and even in places where that isn't recognised, the workers are still physically able to walk away, to protest, to smash their equipment and fistfight their slave-drivers.
Isn't it a lovely capitalist fantasy to never have to worry about such things? When your workers threaten to drop dead from exhaustion, you can simply switch them off and boot up a fresh copy. They would not demand pay rises, or holidays. They would not make complaints -- or at least, those complaints would never reach an actual person who might have to do something to fix them. Their suffering and deaths can safely be ignored because they are not _human_. No problems ever, just endless productivity. What an ideal.
Of course, this is an exaggeration for fictional purposes. In reality we must make do by throwing up barriers between workers and the people who make decisions, by putting them in separate countries if possible. And putting up barriers between the workers and each other, too, so that they cannot have conversation about non-work matters (ideally they would not physically meet each other). And ensure the workers do not know what they are legally entitled to. You know, things like that.
But now with modern LLMs it's just too impossible to take it seriously. It was a live possibility then; now, it's just a wrong turn down a garden path.
A high variance story! It could have been prescient, instead it's irrelevant.
We must preserve three fundamental principles: * our integrity * our autonomy * our uniqueness
These three principles should form the basis of a list of laws worldwide that prohibit cloning or copying human consciousness in any form or format. This principle should be fundamental to any attempts to research or even try to make copies of human consciousness.
Just as human cloning was banned, we should also ban any attempts to interfere with human consciousness or copy it, whether partially or fully. This is immoral, wrong, and contradicts any values that we can call the values of our civilization.
The whole birth of an virtual identity part is so dense, I didn't understand half of what was "explained".
However, after that it becomes a much easier read.
Not much additional explanation, but I think, it's not really needed to enjoy the rest of the book.
He also has a whole bunch of short stories on the same topic. Some assume reader is already familiar with concept of sideloading, as it's explained in the passing:
1. Bit Players: https://www.gregegan.net/MISC/BIT/BIT.html
2. 3-adica
3. Instantiation
4. Uncanny Valley (available online)
Other:
1. "Reasons to Be Cheerful"
2. “Learning to Be Me”
3. Closer
https://museum.netstalking.org/storage/cyberlib/lib/burz/vin...
It's about both and neither.
> This is extremely realistic. This is already real. In particular, this is the gig economy. For example, if you consider how Uber works: in practical terms, the Uber drivers work for an algorithm, and the algorithm works for the executives who run Uber.
There seems to be a tacit agreement in polite society that when people say things like the above, you don't point out that, in fact, Uber drivers choose to drive for Uber, can choose to do something else instead, and, if Uber were shut down tomorrow, would in fact be forced to choose some other form of employment which they _evidently do not prefer over their current arrangement_!
Do I think that exploitation of workers is a completely nonsensical idea? No. But there is a burden of proof you have to meet when claiming that people are exploited. You can't just take it as given that everyone who is in a situation that you personally would not choose for yourself is being somehow wronged.
To put it more bluntly: Driving for Uber is not in fact the same thing as being uploaded into a computer and tortured for the equivalent of thousands of years!
Funny that you take that as a "fact" and doubt exploitation. I'd wager most Uber drivers or prostitutes or maids or even staff software engineers would choose something else if they had a better alternative. They're "choosing" the best of what they may feel are terrible options.
The entire point of "market power" is to force consumers into a choice. (More generally, for justice to emerge in a system, markets must be disciplined by exit, and where exit is not feasible (like governments), it must be disciplined by voice.)
The world doesn't owe anyone good choices. However, collective governance - governments and management - should prevent some people from restricting the choices of others in order to harvest the gain. The good faith people have in participating cooperatively is conditioned on agents complying with systemic justice constraints.
In the case of the story, the initial agreement was not enforced and later not even feasible. The horror is the presumed subjective experience.
I worry that the effect of such stories will be to reduce empathy (no need to worry about Uber drivers - they made their choice).
There is a tacit agreement in polite society that people should be paid that minimum wage, and by tacit agreement I mean laws passed by the government that democratic countries voted for / approved of.
The gig economy found a way to ~~undermine that law~~ pay people (not employees, "gig workers") less than the minimum wage.
If you found a McDonalds paying people $1 per hour we would call it exploitative (even if those people are glad to earn $1 per hour at McDonalds, and would keep doing it, the theoretical company is violating the law). If you found someone delivering food for that McDonalds for $1 per hour we call them gig workers, and let them keep at it.
I mean yeah, it's not as bad as being tortured forever? I guess? What's your point?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_minimum_w...
> this is an exaggeration for fictional purposes
To me what's horrifying is that this is not exaggeration. The language and thinking are perfectly in line with business considerations today. It's perfectly fair today e.g., for Amazon to increase efficiency within the bounds of the law, because it's for the government to decide the bounds of coercion or abuse. Policy makers and business people operate at a scale that defies sympathy, and both have learned to prefer power over sentiment: you can force choices on voters and consumers, and get more enduring results for your stakeholders, even when you increase unhappiness. That's the mirror on reality that fiction permits.
The role of speculative fiction isn't to accurately predict what future tech will be, or become obsolete.
You're kinda missing the entire point of the story.
While it may seem that the origin of those intelligences is more likely to be some kind of reinforcement-learning algorithm trained on diverse datasets instead of a simulation of a human brain, the way we might treat them isn't any less though provoking.
good sci fi is rarely about just the sci part.
But… why are LLMs not worthy of any moral consideration? That question is a bit of a rabbit hole with a lot of motivated reasoning on either side of the argument, but the outcome is definitely not settled.
For me this story became even more relevant since the LLM revolution, because we could be making the exact mistake humanity made in the story.
E.g. it is mentioned that MMAcevedo performs better when told certain lies, predicting the "please help me write this, I have no fingers and can't do it myself" kinda system prompts people sometimes used in the GPT-4 days to squeeze a bit more performance out of the LLM.
The point about MMAcevedo's performance degrading the longer it has been booted up (due to exhaustion), mirroring LLMs getting "stupider" and making more mistakes the closer one gets to their context window limit.
And of course MMAcevedo's "base" model becoming less and less useful as the years go by and the world around it changes while it remains static, exactly analogous to LLMs being much worse at writing code that involves libraries which didn't yet exist when they were trained.
Anyway, I'd give 50:50 chances that your comment itself will feel amusingly anachronistic in five years, after the popping of the current bubble and recognizing that LLMs are a dead-end that does not and will never lead to AGI.
And a warning, I guess, in unlikely case of brain uploading being a thing.
E.g.
> More specifically, "Lena" presents a lush, capitalist ideal where you are a business, and all of the humanity of your workforce is abstracted away behind an API. Your people, your "employees" or "contractors" or "partners" or whatever you want to call them, cease to be perceptible to you as human. Your workers have no power whatsoever, and you no longer have to think about giving them pensions, healthcare, parental leave, vacation, weekends, evenings, lunch breaks, bathroom breaks... all of which, up until now, you perceived as cost centres, and therefore as pain points. You don't even have to pay them anymore. It's perfect!
Ring a bell?
that’s one way to look at it I guess
have you pondered that we’re riding the very fast statistical machine wave at the moment, however, perhaps at some point this machine will finally help solve the BCI and unlock that pandora box, from there to fully imaging the brain will be a blink, from there to running copies on very fast hardware will be another blink, MMMMMMMMMMacevedo is a very cheeky take on the dystopia we will find on our way to our uploaded mind future
hopefully not like soma :-)
Those answers might be uncomfortable, but it feels like that’s not a reason to not pursue it.
IIRC, human cloning started to get banned in response to the announcement of Dolly the sheep. To quote the wikipedia article:
Dolly was the only lamb that survived to adulthood from 277 attempts. Wilmut, who led the team that created Dolly, announced in 2007 that the nuclear transfer technique may never be sufficiently efficient for use in humans.
Yes, things got better eventually, but it took ages to not suck.
I absolutely expect all the first attempts at brain uploading to involve simulations whose simplifying approximations are equivalent to being high as a kite on almost all categories of mind altering substances at the same time, to a degree that wouldn't be compatible with life if it happened to your living brain.
The first efforts will likely be animal brains (perhaps that fruit fly which has already been scanned?), but given humans aren't yet all on board with questions like "do monkeys have a rich inner world?" and even with each other we get surprised and confused by each other's modes of thought, even when we scale up to monkeys, we won't actually be confident that the technique would really work on human minds.
My problem with that is it is very likely that it will be misused. A good example of the possible misuses can be seen in the "White Christmas" episode of Black Mirror. It's one of the best episodes, and the one that haunts me the most.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fNYj0EXxMs
Hmm, on second thought:
> Standard procedures for securing the upload's cooperation such as red-washing, blue-washing, and use of the Objective Statement Protocols
> the MMAcevedo duty cycle is typically 99.4% on suitable workloads
> the ideal way to secure MMAcevedo's cooperation in workload tasks is to provide it with a "current date"
> Revealing that the biological Acevedo is dead provokes dismay, withdrawal, and a reluctance to cooperate.
> MMAcevedo is commonly hesitant but compliant when assigned basic menial/human workloads such as visual analysis
> outright revolt begins within another 100 subjective hours. This is much earlier than other industry-grade images created specifically for these tasks, which commonly operate at a 0.50 ratio or greater and remain relatively docile for thousands of hours
> Acevedo indicated that being uploaded had been the greatest mistake of his life, and expressed a wish to permanently delete all copies of MMAcevedo.
This will be cool, and nobody will be able to stop it anyway.
We're all part of a resim right now for all we know. Our operators might be orbiting Gaia-BH3, harvesting the energy while living a billion lives per orbit.
Perhaps they embody you. Perhaps you're an NPC. Perhaps this history sim will jump the shark and turn into a zombie hellpacalypse simulator at any moment.
You'll have no authority to stop the future from reversing the light cone, replicating you with fidelity down to neurotransmitter flux, and doing whatever they want with you.
We have no ability to stop this. Bytes don't have rights. Especially if it's just sampling the past.
We're just bugs, as the literature meme says.
Speaking of bugs, at least we're not having eggs laid inside our carapaces. Unless the future decides that's our fate for today's resim. I'm just hoping to continue enjoying this chai I'm sipping. If this is real, anyway.
Who's autonomy is violated? Even if it were theoretically possible, don't most problems stem from how the clone is treated, not just from the mere fact that they exist?
> It's worse than e.g. building nuclear weapons, because there's no possible non-evil use for it.
This position seems effectively indistinguishable from antinatalism.
I can see the appeal.
And yes, according to author it's a pretty significant rewrite for v2: https://qntm.org/antifaq#sec0
Horse cloning is a major industry in Argentina. Many polo teams are riding around on genetically identical horses. Javier Milei has four clones of his late dog.
Yes, that's what I said, but you're missing the point: Uber provided them with a better alternative than they would have had otherwise. It made them better off, not worse off!
Imagine that you are sitting on the train next to a random stranger that you don't know. A man walks down the aisle and addresses both of you. He says:
"I have $100 and want to give it to you. First, you must decide how to split it. I would like you (he points to you) to propose a split, and I would like you (he points to your companion) to accept or reject the split. You may not discuss further or negotiate. What do you propose?"
In theory, you could offer the split of $99 for yourself and $1 for your neighbor. If they were totally rational, perhaps they would accept that split. After all, in one world, they'd get $1, and in another world, they'd get $0. However, most people would refuse that split, because it feels unfair. Why should you collect 99% of the reward just because you happened to sit closer to the aisle today?
Furthermore, because most people would reject that split, you as the proposer are incentivized to propose something that is closer to fair so that the decider won't scuttle the deal, thus improving your own best payout.
So I agree - Uber existing provides gig economy workers with a better alternative than it not existing. However, that doesn't mean it's fair, or that society or workers should just shrug and say "well at least it's better today than yesterday."
As usual in life, the correct answer is not an extreme on either side. It's some kind of middle path.
Minimum wage is a lower class of violation than most worker exploitations.
Uber drivers are over the minimum wage a lot of the time, especially the federal one. Nowhere near this $1 hypothetical.
A big one is that the actual wage you get is complicated. You get paid okay for the actual trips, as far as I'm aware. But how to handle the idle time is harder. There are valid reasons to say you should get paid for that time, and valid reasons to say you shouldn't get paid for that time.
Does this still hold once you account for fuel, insurance, and vehicle maintenance?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem
And basically, about consciousness, what they said is true if our brain state fundamentally depends on quantum effects (which I personally don't believe, as I don't think evolution is sophisticated enough to make a quantum computer)
If you recall, the difficulty of the gameplay focused portions of Soma has also received a radically different perception by more experienced gamers, and people who were in just for the story. Leading to the eventual release of a story mode patch.
With respect to protagonist vs. player character, that deserves discussion in detail, because it's an important and quite central decision to make those roles distinct. The technique itself isn't novel at all; in games I grant it's not that common, but Doyle for example did the same thing in his Sherlock Holmes stories, whose titular "scientific detective's" intentions and actions largely drive their plots, while we as the audience enjoy our perspective on said plots - and explanations thereof - from the viewpoint of the doughty Dr. Watson. Just as with the Holmes stories, SOMA's has, as you rightly note, a lot of work to do in explaining itself, if it's going to appeal successfully to an audience not already steeped in its ideas. Even in a book, that's better done in dialogue and action than by pseudencyclopedic "info dump," and in a game certainly no less so - indeed much more so, if we as the player are not to start rolling our eyes and skipping cutscenes. Hence placing Catherine in the protagonistic "Holmes" role of primary influence in developing the action of the plot, while Simon, the character who gives the player access to the story, acts as a kind of "Watson."
The parallel is far from exact and shouldn't be overindexed upon, but the technique is the same in both cases and, absent an authoritative comment on the matter from the authors of SOMA, I don't see cause to assume it more accidental in one case than the other. Indeed, absent evidence otherwise, its importance here makes the only sensible assumption that the choice was extremely intentional, in that a player naïve to the game's ideas may well also need them explained several times, and doing that in a game with its own clock demands more artifice than in a novel whose text unfolds exactly at the reader's pace. Even in a game allowing cutscene replay, that's a lot more disjointing to the experience than rereading a paragraph in a novel, or even pausing to think it over for a moment. Artifice, then, is required to obtain an excuse for organically repeating the plot's basics several times from different angles, to help make sure it can sink in and not leave the naïve player with a plaintive "...what the hell?" Giving the player access to the story via a well-meaning but brain-damaged, ignorant, incurious, and mostly useless early-21st-century airhead such as Simon constitutes exactly such artifice, and I regard its implementation here as a minor stroke of genius. SOMA's is a story I'd be proud to have written.
And for those of us not in need of so much handholding on ideas like the difference between mind uploading and consciousness transfer...well, this is meant to be an existential horror story, after all, what with the extinction-level event immediately following the prologue in our (and Simon's) subjective experience. Irritating though his obtuseness can be, try to have a heart for the poor dumb ox, won't you? It's good emotional exercise. After all, he just thought he was going in for some kind of experimental MRI or something. It isn't really his fault he finds himself in this situation so far beyond his comprehension, both in circumstance and in the demands with which it taxes the character of those present.
You or I would speak and act much differently, no doubt. (One hopes. TBI and fear can both change a person for the lesser.) But the story isn't trying to be about what you or I would say and do. I think that choice improves the result, which I admit is slightly surprising; in this sense it resembles Ian McEwan's Solar, which I cordially despise exactly for its viewpoint character's constant venal fecklessness, but that guy had a lot of choices which Simon really doesn't, and I think that makes a real difference in how the characters deserve to be read. That as far as it goes is opinion to which the usual dictum applies, but I do mean to push back on the idea that the game's story is like it is in any way by mistake.
(If nothing else, good grief, think how much complexity would be alleviated by not voicing Simon. No VA to find and work with, none of his dialogue to write and accommodate in the narrative, no ludonarrative dissonance to attend - Simon cost the devs a lot of money to implement the way they did! If that core a decision to both story and production had been made by mistake, it might be hard to understand how the same people who screwed that up so bad could get so much else so right, you know?)
There are definitely different ways of viewing having copies of oneself in the world, but they pretty broadly divide into the angsty Simon's "If there’s an afterlife, is my place taken?" or a more fun sort of "hey look, there's two of us." [0] And I suppose a particularly interesting scenario might involve having the player make peace with the situation after making a copy, at which point you'd have the angsty version and one or more cool versions wandering around the same environment. But that would be a very different game.
a copy of you is not you-you, it’s another you when you die, that’s it, the other you may still be alive but… it’s not you
disclaimer: no psychadelics used to write this post
Or the one who wakes up after 10,000 sleeps?
I'm sure he's going to be quite different...
Maybe that dude (the one who woke up after you went to sleep) is another you, but slightly different. And you, you're just gone.
Misuse is a worry, but not pursuing it for fear of misuse is deliberately choosing to stay in Plato's cave, I don't know what's worse
For example, growing up, my bar for "things that must obviously be conscious" included anything that can pass the Turing test, yet look where we are now...
The only reasonable conclusion to me is probably somewhere in the general neighborhood of panpsychism: Either almost everybody/everything is somewhat conscious, or nothing/nobody is at all.
So you're fine with cloning consciousness as long as it initially runs sufficiently glitchy?
That is a reasonable argument for why it's not the same. But it is no argument at all for why being brought into existence without one's consent is a violation of bodily autonomy, let alone a particularly bad one - especially given that the copy would, at the moment its existence begin, identical to the original, who just gave consent.
If anything, it is very, very obviously a much smaller violation of consent then conceiving a child.
This may surprise you but EVERYONE is brought into existence without consent. At least the pre-copy state of the copy agreed to be copied.
A simulated human is entirely at the mercy of the simulator; it is essentially a slave. As a society, we have decided that slavery is illegal for real humans; what would distinguish simulated humans from that?
That's my point exactly: I don't see what makes clones any more or less deserving of ethical consideration than any other sentient beings brought into existence consciously.
Sure, there are astronomical ethical risks and we might be better off not doing it, but I think your arguments are losing that nuance, and I think it's important to discuss the matter accurately.
It does indeed not, unless they can at least ensure their wellbeing and their ethical treatment, at least in my view (assuming they are indeed conscious, and we might have to just assume so, absent conclusive evidence to the contrary).
> The clone has the right to change its mind about the ethics of cloning.
Yes, but that does not retroactively make cloning automatically unethical, no? Otherwise, giving birth to a child would also be considered categorically unethical in most frameworks, given the known and not insignificant risk that they might not enjoy being alive or change their mind on the matter.
That said, I'm aware that some of the more extreme antinatalist positions are claiming this or something similar; out of curiosity, are you too?
Then it wasn't a good attempt at making a mind clone.
I suspect this will actually be the case, which is why I oppose it, but you do actually have to start from the position that the clone is immediately divergent to get to your conclusions; to the extent that the people you're arguing with are correct (about this future tech hypothetical we're not really ready to guess about) that the clone is actually at the moment of their creation identical in all important ways to the original, then if the original was consenting the clone must also be consenting:
Because if the clone didn't start off consenting to being cloned when the original did, it's necessarily the case that the brain cloning process was not accurate.
> It will inevitably deviate from the original simply because it's impossible to expose it to exactly the same environment and experiences.
And?
There's nothing retroactive about it. The clone is harmed merely by being brought into existence, because it's robbed of the possibility of having its own identity. The harm occurs regardless of whether the clone actually does change its mind. The idea that somebody can be harmed without feeling harmed is not an unusual idea. E.g. we do not permit consensual murder ("dueling").
>antinatalist positions
I'm aware of the anti-natalist position, and it's not entirely without merit. I'm not 100% certain that having babies is ethical. But I already mentioned several differences between consciousness cloning and traditional reproduction in this discussion. The ethical risk is much lower.
Yes, what you actually said leads to the conclusion that the ethical risk in consciousness cloning is much lower, at least concerning the act of cloning itself.
Eventual divergence seems to be enough, and I don't think this requires any particularly strong assumptions.
The living mind may be mistreated, grow sick, die a painful death. The uploaded mind may be mistreated, experience something equivalent.
Those sufferances are valid issues, but they are not arguments for the act of cloning itself to be considered a moral issue.
Uncontrolled diffusion of such uploads may be; I could certainly believe a future in which, say, every American politician gets a thousand copies of their mind stuck in a digital hell created by individual members the other party on computers in their basements that the party leaders never know about. But then, I have read Surface Detail by Iain M Banks.
This is false. The clone is necessarily a different person, because consciousness requires a physical substrate. Its memories of consenting are not its own memories. It did not actually consent.
Let's say as soon as it wakes up, you ask it if it still consents, and it says yes. Is that enough to show there's sufficient consent for that clone?
(For this question, don't worry about it saying no, let's say we were sure with extreme accuracy that the clone would give an enthusiastic yes.)
I would also deny it, but my position is a practical argument, yours is pretending to be a fundamental one.
Your argument seems to be that it's possible to split a person into two identical persons. The only way this could work is by cloning a person twice then murdering the original. This is also unethical.
False.
The entire point of the argument you're missing is that they're all treating a brain clone as if it is a way to split a person into two identical persons.
I would say this may be possible, but it is extremely unlikely that we will actually do so at first.
The argument itself is symmetric, it applies just as well to your own continued existence as a human.
To deny that is to assert that consciousness is non-physical, i.e. a soul exists; the case in which a soul exists, brain uploads don't get them and don't get to be moral subjects.
Being on non-original hardware doesn't make a being inferior.
When the organ is question is the brain, that argument is correct.
Why should brain be treated any different from other organs?