> If you cloned me while I'm sleeping and I never knew about it, you could torture and kill the other "me" and I'd be none the wiser
If I tortured you, then healed you and removed your memories you would be none the wiser as well. Does that mean I weren't torturing you, but someone else?
If I cloned you, tortured your clone and killed it while you were asleep, then merged his memories to you - was it you who I was torturing or not? Why is the difference meaningful?
Programming isn't very good analogy, because there is no definition of conciousness, so even if we recreate the problematic situations in some programming model - we still don't have any answers. Example:
You can serialize an instance of a class, delete the instance, then deserialize it. The memory address will be different, the == operator in some languages will return true, in many others - false, but there's no one answer if the object is the same or not when it comes to conciousness. There is no clear analog of pointer identity in real world. If we had evidence of souls that would be it, but we don't :)
Some GC languages can move objects in memory when the application is running. Is this the same object? What does this say about conciousness? Nothing IMHO.
When GC moves object in memory and updates all references to it - is this the same object, or a different one? What if it created a pool of objects, serialized object at address 1, loaded a different object there, and deserialized old object from address 1 to address 2? Is the object at address1 or the object at address 2 the old one? The pointer equality isn't very useful here.
> for whatever definition of me that I have, it involves this particular instance of conscious experience
Then sleeping is the same as death.