52midnight
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> The view that man has a fluid and not a fixed nature has been popular since about the 1960s.
True within the Western context. If you go to the Vedas you'll find this concept is very old, albeit couched in different terms, especially given that it's translated out of ancient Devanagari texts.
The idea that a person's consciousness can be "uploaded" into a cyborg avatar stems from the positivist assertion that consciousness is an emergent property of neurochemistry, and mind is nothing more than a sensory illusion of the brain's operation. Personally, I believe that the truth is far different.
The whole program will seem too far-fetched to be real to many; but I think that, given sufficient determination, it may be possible to anchor consciousness in a sufficiently sophisticated artefact, and that is, quite frankly, a terrifying prospect. Does food taste the same, if at all, to an electronic cyborg? Do colours look the same? Are sensations as satisfying? I doubt them all. Imagine a cyborg George W. Bush in a century or two; he can't get drunk, because the electronics don't respond, food has no taste, and he hasn't got his end in for two hundred years, so he's as frustrated as hell. What sort of a tyrant would that be?
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