Where are you? Not geographically or temporally. Where is your consciousness, where you feel like you are experiencing the world from? I’d guess that most of you would say “somewhere behind the eyes.” But we know that there’s nothing especially special back there aside from your meaty brain (possibly the most complicated few kilograms in the universe). The point is that it’s hard to measure where “you” are in relation to where you feel you are. What if we transferred your consciousness into a Ghost in the Shell-style body? Then we might be able to measure “you” in a different way…
In my latest Because Science, I’m trying to calculate how much your “ghost” weighs. Weird question with a fascinating answer. If you are your consciousness, then right now you are a very special collection of electrical signals blasting and burning around neurons. But if you uploaded yourself into a synthetic brain, it’s plausible that the mass of the storage system would change.
Flash memory, like the kind running on your device right now, would be a good bet for storing the contents of a human brain. And based on how flash memory works, it would give substance to your spirit. How much? You’ll have to watch my latest episode above to find out.
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