we're now at a point where there's a chance that "consciousness" will move beyond neuro-organic containers. to be sure, consciousness as we know it is a complex emergent feature of the interplay between the hardware of human physiology and the firmware of billions of years of behavioral evolution. current experiments in artificial intelligence are making good use of research in neuro-biology. we're only going to learn more about the interaction between the human consciousness program and the biocomputer on which it runs. i have faith that within our lifetimes we may begin to see neuro-cognitive protheses that repair some forms of brain damage or enhance the cognitive abilities of their users.
it's not difficult to imagine a device whose synthetic axons link carbon-based neurons and silicon systems. if you could connect a few thousand or tens of thousands of these synthetic axons to the human brain, you could begin to carry neurological signals over radio, fibre or copper data networks. with further research, we may uncover how to modulate these signals to present information these networks provide to the human consciousness.
taking this even further, if we developed a model of the human brain and it's interaction with consciousness, perhaps we could develop a brain simulator that is programmed by sending millions of synthetic axons into the human brain. at this point, your consciousness would exist in both places: inside your head, and inside the artificial system. it seems to me that you would be a hybrid being at that point. the big question is what happens when you cut the cord linking the two? would the massively parallel program running in the artificial brain be truly conscious? would it really be you?
we're now at the cusp where we can begin to expand consciousness into a new, slightly more abstract domain. psychologists have suggested the subjective experience of the self, by the wetware running inside your head is limited. the "you" that you think you are is a tiny fraction of what's going on; that's the idea of the subconscious, there's this huge reservoir of perceptual and cognitive processing that you just don't see. so you say the thing in the box isn't the real you? so what? neither are you.
