Is pulling people's pants down your normal response to using words that aren't well-defined?

No, but it's one way to expose them.

I see what you're doing, and I like it :)

But what I mean by expose is to reveal to people that this person is a liar. What I mean by "soul" or "consciousness" is the common usage of the term. Essentially, this person would be claiming that he can move a participant's essence or frame of view (with memories, personality, etc.) from a human body to a digital one. At least, that's how I would interpret it, and I don't think the average person would be that far off.

It's undefined terms all the way down.

"Soul", "consciousness", "essence", "frame of view", "personality", "memories" are all undefined terms. The question you really want unambiguously answered is "what the essence of a person?"

For example, if you define "essence" as "the manner in which an agent interacts with the outside world", then provided you interact with people entirely via text chat, your "essence" could be uploaded (with a sufficiently advanced simulation).

If you define "essence" as the "continuity of bodily processes that keep a human alive", then no, as your digital replica is not continuing your bodily functions.

If you define "consciousness" as a "subjective" experience, then the question is unanswerable, precisely because you've left the measure of "consciousness" up to the "subject". In addition, your definition of "subject" becomes circular, because "subject X" is the agent with "consciousness X" and "consciousness X" is the experience that "subject X" goes through. So really, when you say "consciousness" is subjective, what you're doing is punting on how you tell what a "subject" is.

Right, but that's missing the forest for the trees, isn't it?

The implication of your answer is that you COULDN'T tell that the person is lying, because you'd be too lost in semantics to tell left from right. So, you fall victim to his charade.

Are you claiming that it's not possible to define consciousness?

No, I defined it already. You keep trying to show me that my definition isn't good enough, but you haven't yet established why that discussion is relevant to my main point.

Is this your definition of consciousness?

> What I mean by "soul" or "consciousness" is the common usage of the term. Essentially, this person would be claiming that he can move a participant's essence or frame of view (with memories, personality, etc.) from a human body to a digital one. At least, that's how I would interpret it, and I don't think the average person would be that far off.

If so, the issue is that you've defined the unknown term ("consciousness"), in terms of other unknown terms ("essence", "frame of view", etc.), which doesn't actually resolve the problem of grounding the word "consciousness".

For example, to some Catholics, the "essence" of a person is their soul, which is tied to the body granted to them by God. And so, the salesman in your original question is obviously lying, because by definition, their "essence" is tied to their physical body.

The only reason the question is difficult to answer is because it's a metaphysical question. There is no physical definition of consciousness, or frame of view. So whether or not your "consciousness" shifts when you use this machine entirely depends on how your metaphysical beliefs define "consciousness".