I would agree with David Baron’s remark below that this article represents the best of reporting on science-fiction. But in fact, it is worse than that, since people will actually believe these ‘brain downloads as consciousness’ fads to the point that it becomes a hallucination. What really needs to be studied is not consciousness and immortality – this article or what it reports on does not even arrive at a phenomenology — but the unconscious and mortality; or in this context, idiocy, hallucination, and psychosis. Why am I such an idiot? Or why can’t I be a snail or a machine? This is the real content of the article.

Last, has anyone in such fad research even bothered to ask what are the implications of the incompleteness theorem of Gödel or Church’s Thesis? If so, they would save not only themselves a lot of trouble, but put to rest a dominant hallucination.

Until then,

S