The idea that people who aren't so sure about this as you are have isn't that telepathy is going on. It's that if this sort of mind-state cloning is going on, you might no longer have grounds to expect to wake up as the physically original instance of yourself with 100 % certainty after the cloning procedure.

People are made of atoms, and so far we haven't found any magical quality beyond physically stored memories that gives us reason to think a person at one point in time is the same as a person in another point in time, including ourselves as the person. With the mind-state cloning going on, at some point in time there is going to be one present person with a past person's memories being unsurprised at not having ended up as an upload, and another present person with the same past person's memories being quite surprised at ending up as an upload despite remembering having been a physical person who expects to continue living as a physical person. I'm not quite sure what kind of definition of self would let the past person maintain a justified 100 % expectation that they will end up as the non-uploaded version of themselves in the future.

It's about empathy. I can't be tortured that way, and neither can you. But a copy or a construct could be - and many of us find the thought just as distasteful as if it were a flesh-and-blood person.

If the simulation could talk to me, I'd rather it be treated decently.

This being said, I think there are ways to go around this problem. There are many ways in which my brain could be disabled so I wouldn't mind it being "tortured" or experimented upon. Consciousness is an emergent property - take away a few of its building blocks and it disappears.

Do you think it is OK for F or a brain mdoel to experience pain? As long as it is not you who is feeling the pain, it is moral acceptable? Is that what you are saying?

Well no, of course not! (assuming a brain model does experience pain)

I'm just saying if this theoretical "virtual hell" does really happen, it will be a computer hell, not a human hell.

Although I don't actually think a computer simulating a brain model will have consciousness. However complex that simulation is, it's nothing more than electrons flowing through a circuit, and this flow has no intrinsic meaning; I have no reason to believe consciousness can arise from such a thing.

He's only saying that a copy of a brain would create a separate entity, and that separate entities won't share experiences. Like how identical twins have different experiences. There were no claims about morality of using brain models for testing.