In my essay describing accelerated thought, I discuss what could happen if we were able to improve our brains' speed using technological means. Certainly this has interesting implications.

Related to that: What if we were able to effectively copy-and-paste our minds out of our brains, and into a computer system? By the time the software exists to permit such a thing, the computing hardware will have evolved in terms of speed, parallel processing capability, redundancy, etc. to the point where it can support a full consciousness.

As an example, consider a portion of the movie "The Matrix", which takes place just after Neo has had his brain effectively hijacked while on board Nebuchannezzar. In his mind, Neo stands in a stark white space, devoid of anything but him, Morpheus, a couple of chairs, and a television. Morpheus tells Neo that everything he's experiencing is being fed to his brain by the ship's computers.

Neo: "This... this isn't real?"

Morpheus: "What is 'real'? How do you define 'real'? If 'real' is what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then 'real' is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain."

At an electrochemical level, this is correct. Remove the body from the brain, but provide the brain with exactly the same electrical signals, and the brain knows no difference.

If a brain's inputs can be taken over by computing hardware, it's not too much of a leap to conceive that sufficiently advanced computing hardware and software could effectively create a consciousness and sustain it. And by extension of that, it would be quite possible to transfer our consciousness out of our brains and not a computer-based system.

Assuming that we can, in fact, take our consciousness out of our brains and put it into a computer system, what does that mean? For one thing, we'll think incomprehensibly faster than we do now. But in addition, if we have a method of input to our brains that doesn't involve bodies, that frees us up in lots of ways. We don't have to be physically present to see, touch, smell, hear, or taste anything at all. Your consciousness could instantly be walking the Great Wall, touching the bottom of the Mariana Trench, or gently gliding over Everest. You could instantly and be face-to-face with another person, touching one another, talking, seeing the same (or different) things. The other "person", so to speak, wouldn't even need to have originated as a human being; it could be a construct that's created within the computational system.

Beyond broader experience, we become immortal, in a way. If our consciousness outlives our bodies, the traditional notion of death becomes obsolete. If computing becomes embedded into the very fabric of the world we inhabit, and if the system can reliably support thought-type computation, we would only be dependent on a computing system that will undoubtedly be faster, more robust, redundant, and altogether more persistent than our protein-based bodies. As it stands, our consciousness depends on our bodies because our consciousness occurs in our biological brains. Separate the consciousness from the brain, and the body becomes unnecessary but the mind can continue on in an environment with some very different possibilities.

There are definitely feasibility questions regarding this issue. I'm assuming that this concept is a possibility; proving it is (or isn't) isn't my concern. But like so many issues concerning the technological singularity, if we wait to think about it until we've seen that it's possible, our thought will be too late to be useful.