How to become a robot.


One of the staple cliches of scifi is to transfer a person's consciousness to a computer (especially one in a robot), but the question remains, is this robot actually the person, or is just a copy of the person? The same argument is often applied to the transporter device in Star Trek: is the person stepping out of the transporter simply a copy of a person that was destroyed on a distant transporter platform? What is self, and what is the soul attached to?

Personally, I think the way to do it is to gradually replace living brain tissue with artificial components until nothing is left except the artificial computer brain, which can then be extracted from the body and placed in a robot body with the strength of five gorillas (alternatively, the organic brain can be placed in a robot until the conversion is complete).

Anyway, now we're a step closer. Here's a Fox News story about some researchers that glued a rat brain cell and some snail brain cells to some microchips (as seen in above photo):
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,189323,00.html

Labels: geek stuff, science/tech