Well, first you have to convince me that we aren't already living in The Matrix...

Seriously though, the human brain? The electricity tickles the meat and the meat makes sauce. When the electricity runs down one string of neurons, and the sauce covers the right receptors, we recall memories and feel emotions. If we could generate the right voltage of electricity, and place it at the right neuron, we could trick a brain into feeling whatever we want it to. Without a frame of reference, without some other verifiable type of existence to compare our experiences in this world against, there's no way to prove that we're not in a simulation running in our own head. Sorry to say, but I think that a "soul" is nothing more than a personality, shaped by the life that it has lead.

There was a good Black Mirror episode about that too. (Season 2: Episode 1.)

Nobody knows the answer to this; some philosophers deny the soul by saying there are no philosophical zombies- Which is a concept in philosophy that prefers physicalism / materialism to a dualistic concept of the soul.

I believe a player piano is a good example of a philosophical zombie. A player piano is a mechanical piano rather like a music box, which performs music using a mechanism that "reads" rolls of paper with perforations corresponding to piano keys being struck. A real pianist plays a piano and records his playing on a roll, which then gets taken to a player piano. When the player piano plays the roll, it sounds identical to the real pianist. However, unlike a human pianist, a player piano has no conscious, feeling experience of the music itself.

Please see my post on The Human Connectome Project in Academic

How about a brain transplant into a lab-grown clone body?

I don't believe in true persistence of self even within the same body, but trying to copy the contents of a brain (memories, personality, mental states, etc.) and the chemical dependencies, etc., well, as much as I don't think personal identity is maintained over time I really don't think digitization of the brain would be a continuation of self. At best, it would be a copy with necessary differences going forward (because the lack of the material brain would necessarily change the way thoughts are processed and memories are formed). But, really, I think the distinction is much greater than that. I don't think our brains are all that similar to computers, even though that's the analogy we tend to use when thinking about how the brain works. It seems very likely to me that information isn't stored discretely and that data, functionality, and physical substance are much more tightly integrated. With computers, we build the components with distinct purpose: data storage, short-term memory modules, processors, etc., but brains developed over millions of years, from very simple nerve clusters to the chunk of gray matter we lug around with us today. I'd be rather surprised to find that vocabulary words are stored somewhere as discrete bits, or that the concept of addition has a memory register somewhere within the brain. I suspect it's far more complex than that, and that data and function aren't separate — that mind and brain aren't so easily separated.

We will need to traverse deep space at some point and will require much more robust bodies and longer life than we currently enjoy.

Yes, it has to be possible - ultimately the survival of the species depends on it

I think most things will be possible in time,
but such a long way to go at the moment.

The problem just isn't imprinting your brainwaves onto an artificial construct. You can't, in any way, transfer your "self" to a non-biological machine. To another brain? Maybe.

Hurdle one: figure out the brain's mechanism of memory storage and means of recall. Hurdle two: translate and digitize all those terabytes of data. Hurdle three: If indeed someone's consciousness were to be digitized and held in a host computer of sorts, there's the question of interaction. In the least, this entity would need to somehow communicate to the outside world via its host's abilities, which would by necessity be entirely different than the original biological counterparts of speech and auditory reception.. There's lots of data that would not be needed anymore, such as voluntary and involuntary nerve innervation and coordination (don't need to walk anymore, or run a beating heart...)

It sure raises a lot of interesting things to ponder.

Waking Up by Sam Harris has some pretty interesting information/thoughts on consciousness. The thought experiment where you are teleported to say Mars but what they don't tell you is that in the process you don't actually teleport, your are copied and sent and when they know it was a success your original self is disintegrated. Is a murder being commited? He also covers the idea that we all have more than one consciousness residing "in" us with perhaps differing ideas on what it wants and needs. Trippy.

What confuses me most is not the concept of cloning/coping a brain into a computer or replica, but other people's disbelief. If a copy of me were made and everyone asked questins and played out senarios for both me and the copy and gained equal results, where's the confusion? It seems like asking if my paperback lord of the rings is different from your hard cover. Compositionally, maybe, but for all intents and purposes, they are the same. This has to do with our preconceptions of existence. "I'm the only me" might be what a walkman feels like in our digital age, but it would ultimately be wrong. Right now you are the only you and as soon as a copy of you undergoes different experiences it will be different but unfortunately I don't see evidence to suggest I possess something cosmically unique.

Considering that neurotransmission has already been (somewhat) artificially recreated, (see link/source) it's fair to say that eventually we could find a way to capture the actual "data" that is being transferred through the synapse. The computational nature of the brain makes it substrate-neutral. The underlying physical substrate of the brain doesn’t matter. It can be organic matter, silicon, or any other material that can process information as efficiently.

Excellent topic by the way. Also I just finished binge watching S1 myself of Altered Carbon. (the book series was awesome, and they stayed very close to the origin.)

This question is exactly where neuroscience and computer science meet in philosophical debate. The truth is that as far as the state of the art is concerned, there is currently no known reason why human consciousness could not one day be captured and stored as data. The technology required to map a human consciousness does not yet exist, and still might never.

The big question is what is consciousness in the first place; would a digital capture be an emulation, or the actual consciousness translated into a new medium?

The problem is currently well summed up by a thought experiment:

If at the moment of my physical death my consciousness were digitised, and a perfect version placed inside a computer through which it could act, a researcher might seek to see if that consciousness was me or simply an acting replica of me.

They could ask it questions about me, but naturally it would know the answers whether it were really me or just a replica.

They could ask if it was me, but it would always say that it was; a perfect copy of me will think that it is me.

The question would still remain: is it me?

As an atheist this is possibly the only thing that keeps me up at night. Even though I am as close to positive as I can be that my mind is just the medium in which my consciousness is held, is there some peculiar speciality about my brain and its ability to generate new data that would be lost if my consciousness were placed into something else? Even if the computer me could generate new data, would it be me? This is the tiny dark corner of myself in which some sliver of mysticism still hides. Perhaps, just perhaps, there is a tiny chance that I do have soul of some kind... god and the devil aside, maybe there is some special "energy" to my life. Then I just remember that puzzling over questions without an ability to test the answers is how religion probably started in the first place, I push it out of mind, fire up the Xbox, and kill some aliens. We all have a limit I suppose!

I think any comments regarding this will be purely subjective and speculative.

Another reason I am posting this is because of the devastating effects of Alzheimer's and dementia. There is something so horrible about this disease that one can't wonder or hope if there was some way of making a "backup copy".