in the vein of permutation city (greg egan) and old man’s war (john scalzi): if the transferral of consciousness between two systems *is* possible, without the creation of a copy (as most would hypothesize) - for example, if consciousness is simply the computations that are being carried out. the fact that they cease to be carried out on one hardware platform and begin to be carried out on another is irrelevant. the results of the computations are pure information and exist outside of physical reality. the fact that they are occurring on a system rooted in this universe/dimension/version-of-reality is just convenient and allows the consciousness in question to affect its surroundings. if the computations were to cease to be carried out alltogether, could they not continue to propagate simply through the fact that they could be given the infinite possible inputs? each possibility its own consciousness in itself. could this imply the existence of a kind of “heaven” or “afterlife”? your brain may stop performing the computations, but its current state can still be extrapolated given arbitrary inputs… your imagined eutopia or guilt driven self-punishment, or all of the above and everything in between at the same time…

I have come to the unfortunate realization that a utopian society where all humans are treated with respect etc.
probably a sort of democratic communism. anything but capitalism really. capitalists suck. but back to my point…
a utopia like this has always been an ideal of mine, and i came to the realization today that it will be impossible to cause it to come into effect prior to the impending sigularity (as described by the likes of kurzwiel).
do we really want then next step in human evolution - a race of beings birthed from our own intelligence - to come into existance where they can see just how flawed their creators are?
a friend of mine (vergel evans - aka: vveerrgg) proposed to me yesterday that instead of wanting to overthrow their flesh-and-blood overlords, that artificial intelligences could potentially view us as gods and angels and the like.
but it looks to me like it will be more like one of those sci-fi stories where the advanced alien civilization does not let humans take part at their level because we are still preoccupied with constant in-fighting and being generally nasty to one another instead of working together. but these will be beings we’ve *created in our own image*, so unless we (read: i ) impose on (read: teach) them our ideals, they might turn out just like their parents - and noone wants that