To make this "transfer" work, you need something that can handle human consciousness. Then you need a system built around it that can respond to the commands of the consciousness. That is to say, you need a brain and a body. So if you have a computer chip capable of running the human operating system and you hook it up to a bunch of components that handle the system's requests, seems like what you have is a human being. But it seems like trying to take consciousness out of the brain is a lot of wasted effort. And it doesn't seem to be what we're doing right now, as we make ourselves less "human". I imagine that a man in an electric wheelchair would not seem very human to people many centuries ago, though we consider it pretty normal. The chair is an extension of his body: his brain sends a signal to his hand to push a joystick up, and that ends up moving him forwards. So to what extent is his consciousness separate from the inhuman hardware? Let's extrapolate wildly to a future where a man is put inside the cockpit of a fighter jet, outfitted with a full life support system. Now, he eats and breathes and speaks inside a jet plane 24/7. He complains about his problematic fuel injector to his friends. He whistles at new models of jet fighters. On his days off, he fuels up and spends some time doing loops over a scenic part of town. He gets reprimanded for hooking himself up to a line that feeds him some very potent, but also corrosive, fuel. At what point is he no longer living inside of something different from himself? And do we actually have to be inside anything at all? Drone pilots certainly don't. Our Matrix bros don't either. Rather than Asimov's idea of a transplanted consciousness zooming around the galaxy, what it we were to keep our consciousnesses comfortably at home and control our [i]new[/i] "bodies" over one hell of a network connection? Inevitably, our limbs will atrophy and we will find easy ways of cutting them off to save weight or energy. If you're lying in a futuristic life pod 24/7, you don't need much more than your brain. And just like we augment our bodies, we augment our brains too, with vast stores of information that are seconds away. This is all just stream-of-consciousness stuff so it probably seems pretty dumb. I guess what I'm wondering is at what point our human consciousness becomes one and the same with the hardware it controls, just like what we consider to be human today.