Yes and no. I don't claim to know the answer to the hard question of consciousness. But, I think no one else does either. Even if we did have an answer I doubt its communicable. I do think my understanding of consciousness is deeper then most peoples. I've done a lot of meditation, a few peoples share of psychedelics (which do not themselves contain answers, but can open doors), and consciousness was my focus in college. I know what Im talking about well enough to know what we don't know. We don't know anything to give us a good reason to think we could put consciousness in computers.

The deeper you go into your awareness the more universal the experience is. You can verify this experientially. Our bodies, thought patterns, emotions and memories all die but the awareness they all rise in (which, being aware of space, time, and identity, is outside of time, space, and identity) is immortal.

"We don't know anything to give us a good reason to think we could put consciousness in computers."

Except that it seems likely that our brains simply follow the laws of physics, like everything else.

"You can verify this experientially."

How?

"the awareness they all rise in (which, being aware of space, time, and identity, is outside of time, space, and identity) is immortal."

I didn't understand that sentence.

1.) Except that the laws of physics do not currently explain why it is that we have any experiences at all, yet it is the continuing to having experiences that is most of interest to people wanting immortality. If that's your reason for thinking we can upload our souls, do you think we know the right physics?

2.) Here are three ways, the best first. 5 to 10 years of meditation lead by the right teacher. A near anesthetic dose of ketamine or experiences with sensory deprivation. Stuart Davis says something like "If you doubt the fact of a spiritual dimension, get a gun, shoot yourself in the head. Freed from that dingy filter you call a mind, confirm through direct experience the ontological status of subtle and causal reality. Upon rebirth, try not to forget it this time."

I personally think the fastest way is to take a week camping, spend three days to read a bunch of Alan Watts, listen to "Love Has No Opposite" by Stuart Davis and everything by Bill Hicks a couple times, catch up on sleep, relax, and hike, then on day four, find a beautiful area to sit and watch water and take a medium low dose of mushrooms, and listen to some gamelan music on speakers while you let the patters of nature and the flowing water merge synaesthetically with the study and relaxation you did and the intricate gamelan music. After six hours, you will understand. Then, spend three days relaxing, reflecting, and get back to work.

You can't do astronomy without a telescope. You can't do medicine without dissecting cadavers. You can't do consciousness without technology to poke at the way the brain perceives itself. The same type of power structure that wanted to keep people from looking in the sky, where they had located the God they were distorting to gain power or the body, where they located the soul, now want to keep us from looking at consciousness, where many of them now locate the soul. In these cases, letting scientists look beyond the curtain threatened the worldview they depended on to keep power. Drugs aren't the only or best tool (long term meditation is best) but for seeing a certain kind of thing in the short term, they can work. Personally, my drug days are behind me. But I learned a lot of good stuff from it.

3.) I know you don't. You have fused with your ego and are unable to take a backwards step from it. (I'm not calling you egotistical or being derogatory). Awareness and ego come apart. Spend a while with your eyes closed, considering the way your sense of space and time, and attention and memory relate to form your identity. Breathe. After 15 or 20 minutes, you might realize that you are observing your identity as a constellation of your space-time concept, attention, memory, and breath. When this happens, your concept of self switches from being the subject through which you interact with objects to being itself an object of awareness. When this happens, what is the new subject? Spend another 20 minutes considering this. The new subject becomes an object as well, and the frontal structure of your personality becomes more and more distant as you climb the subject-object ladder by observing the new subjects an objects of an increasingly broad awareness.

You think you are Tichy. You are, in a way. But, also equally true, Tichy is something you are aware of. That awareness is more essential to who you are then the details of your biography. It is immortal because it is outside of time (because at a certain level of jumping the subject backwards, your time concept becomes an object of awareness). Kurzweil is concerned with preserving the ego. He should be concerned with the thing that sees the ego he is trying to preserve. Your physics doesn't touch that yet.

(It might sound like I'm talking about God. I'm not. Fuck God. But, I think many people make the mistake of confusing this awareness, often discussed in mystical poetry, with a biblical God that is actually just a surface feature of the ego we are trying to put in proper perspective. It might also sound like I'm one of those hippies who's always going on about living in the now. I'm not, fuck those hippies. It's not about one level, like the level past time that you can access with meditation or some drugs used well. It's about a healthy relationship between them all.)

I haven't made the experiences you made, so maybe we can't discuss it in a meaningful way. My thought would be that what you call awareness is just an illusion. Put in another way, I deny that "I think therefore I am" proves the existence of consciousness.

Physics does explain why "we" have experiences. An experience is just an interaction of matter or information. Admittedly, I don't know what matter is, there is of course something about physics we can not understand (to me, so far, the ultimate question is, what does it mean that something exists). But that is another problem than the consciousness issue, in my opinion.

This is fun. I haven't thought about this for a while.

You are completely ignoring the experiential aspect of reality. Buddhism (at it's best, at it's worse it's as bad as the others) treats meditation as a science of interior experience. There are actual things you can do to change the way you perceive yourself, and you can learn things from them by a process which is analogous to science. It features hypothesis testing, experimentation, validation by a community of peers. We can learn intriguing things by looking at the places their practice, which produces measurable permanent effects on the brain, interacts with what they describe experientially. Your worldview leaves no room for this. Go do the experiments. It's easy. It's proven to make you feel better. You will directly perceive why it's wrong to think of experience as just an interaction of localized matter in time. I can't convince you of cell biology without showing you a microscope. And I can't convince you of consciousness and how it relates to these other things if you do not directly use the technology in these areas. I don't understand why people don't think it's scientific. There are confirmable results. Just look through the right door.

And when you do, you will find that rather then stepping into a room, you have a reversal of perception, and your construction of yourself becomes something you step out of. It is exactly that thought "What you call awareness is an illusion" that will flip in this way. What we call awareness is what is aware of the reality that is actually the illusion. This awareness has no properties, no features, it is what all properties and features arise and are experienced in (as you, me, and all the other experiential phenomena). You can perceive it, but when you do, the you you perceive is an object of perception. When the you that is not what you think of as you perceives you instead of perceives through you, your perception inverts and broadens. You can see this, yourself, for yourself, if you let yourself see, at which point there will be no you to be doing the seeing, you see? Do you see at least why you should do the experiments to try to see?