One key issue is that to this point, we don’t know what consciousness is. A field of energy? If so, using what? Conscions? Noosphones? Cerebrites? No, not the last one. Neurology desperately seeks to connect all mental functions to the brain, but I’m not convinced that mental functions are the core operations. For years, I’ve felt or intuited or kind-of perceived that there was something way, way pre-mental going on, and that ‘thought’ isn’t what we think it is.

Either way, we can’t define consciousness yet. It not only observes stuff, through some types of meditation it can observe itself. How odd is that? We still have a somewhat shaky definition of electricity, even though we’ve come much closer in the past decade. But for two centuries, people have been noting shocks from contact with an electric current. Consciousness is much more subtle than electricity, which we can at least measure in voltage and amperage.

And I don’t regard consciousness as being rooted in individual bodies. It affixes itself to specific body-brain units, but it seems capable of moving around. Ever sat down with someone in a fury and found yourself losing control? Or absorbed misery or deep depression off someone sitting or standing beside you on the subway? No? Maybe you’ve not been paying proper attention.

A further factor involved in transferring brain functions to a computer is that in genetics, we have discovered that it’s not simply a matter of gene X produces blue eyes and gene Y produces a tendency towards Type I diabetes. It’s all way more complex than that. Replicating brain chemistry and brain functions is not the same as replicating what (for want of a better word) we call a person. The body is internally interactive – my dinner is interacting with my endocrine system which is affecting my cerebral cortex, which is influencing how I compose this post. And that’s scarcely touching the subtler molecular levels of it all.

We could easily believe we have replicated the brain in a different, less physically restrictive form, and not know, as we feed our mental selves into the fruit of our labours, that we are losing certain things that we can no longer retrieve. Some stuff – attention issues, nervous tics and allergies, or a biochemical predisposition towards depression or psychosis – wouldn’t be missed for a moment, but if we do transfer ourselves over to hyper-complex machines, a huge amount of human experience, striving, creativity and aesthetic response will no longer make much sense to us. We could well be suckered into the whole business by proselytes of some hyper-reductive behaviourism, and end up with consciousness vehicles that would have to evolve all over again before we could attain anything approaching deep understanding of the richness of existence.

Unless, of course, consciousness does turn out to be something that localises itself in brains or minds, but is not confined to them. At that point, the hyper-reductive behaviourists might have something entirely new to learn. As would we all.