Can minds be uploaded in computers? What do you mean by 'to program consciousness?' — univ [quote][/quote]
To make consciousness appear by programming a computer.
Perhaps you could give an example of this future 'transhuman' system you are trying to describe here?
Start with a human close to death. What transhuman scenario do you think would not be possible based on your vague description above? — universeness
I'm not describing a transhuman system. I'm describing the impossibility of these. Transhuman creatures can not be made by man. The emergence of conscious creatures is a slow process taking place in the course of evolution. Its not a programmed process, a process driven by a stored program driving the material in a programmed way. A natural process unraveling, developing, is just different from a programmed process. There is no program executed after start button in the brain is pressed. You can't turn the brain on and off. Well, lots of off buttons actually... But you can't turn it on again...
The situation you describe above is possible imo but will most likely take the lifespan of the Universe to achieve. I have only ever suggested a future situation when all questions have been answered as a comparator with the god omnis or an emergent panpsychism. — universeness
Of course lots of questions can be answered. We can ask nature and she answers. A lot of these answers are given in artificial experiments. Which by the way exactly is the reason I consider science an art! Look at these beautiful experiments done! Einstein-Bose condensates, muon g2 experiments, the discovery of DNA (Watson and Crick didn't mention the female share!), all kinds of models of the unvisible world, the Webb telescope, the upcoming Roman, the parity violation experiment, etcetera, etcetera. An ode to human intelligence and invention. At the same time we know so little of the whole. I mentioned isolated succeses, of which there are plenty, but the natural processes can't be known by definition. The gods are no generally no help in getting to know what they created, but they give a reason science can't provide, and actually, thinking about it, if you know the gods you know the lives they made. And my cosmology is even inspired by them. One big bang is not enough for them.
Human brain storage capacity has been estimated by neuroscience at around 2.5 petabytes. — universeness
Yes, that's true. But I mean the dynamic memory. The memory in the brain is not a static one, like on chips. By the Bekenstein limit, every volume of space can only contain a maximum of information. But the brain can harbor as many processes as there are in the universe. Implicitely. You can engrave zillions of patterns in it and each neuron is involved in all of them.