Title: Biochemistry

Everything that you think of as being you? Is just biochemical reactions in the brain.

That’s a depressing thought. Where does that leave the soul?

There is no soul. Just chemistry and electricity. And meat. Brain meat.

But I have memories. Memories that all add up to me.

Computers have memory too. Turn them on and they run their routines from memory.

Memories. Not memory.

Same thing.

No it isn’t. Memories are specific experiences. Seen only from my point of view.

Walk down the street and shoot some video. Then load it into your computer’s memory. Now it has memories.

But my computer doesn’t know what to do with that video. It doesn’t call it up when it loads something similar.

Algorithms.

Excuse me?

That’s just a matter of algorithms. Notice how YouTube is getting better and better at making suggestions?

Yeah, but that’s just keyword matching.

And your mind isn’t doing something very similar?

I don’t think so, but maybe…

Silicon is the future for us. No more meat.

What do you mean?

Meat gets old and dies. Silicon is forever.

You want to fill your head with sand?

We’ll eventually build computers that have the same memory capacity as our brains.

Then what?

We’ll upload our memories into the silicon memory. And live forever.

What about bad sectors? Memory gets bad sectors.

We’ll use error correcting memory. No bad sectors.

I think you’ve already got some bad sectors. This whole idea stinks.

Why?

Because if we never die, we’re going to have to find a much bigger place for all of us to live than just this tiny planet.

That’s what a universe is FOR.

And what happens if somebody else in the universe already had this idea? And they’re heading our way?

Then we’d better get our meat brains on this now, before it’s too late.

I think I’ll just go hug the ones I love. While I still can.