[jakobe]

The argument with the trash I was trying to make was that we don't need magic to make things that are beyond our understanding. I do believe that our conscious derives from the physical structure of our brain, but that doesn't mean it is possible to "upload" it.

Yes, part of the impossibility stems from the impossibility of reading a brain. Non-destructive measurements aren't possible because the amount of energy required to scan the tiny structures in the brain would destroy it. Destructive measurements would destroy the brain while we read it, and we can only read a subset of the information before the whole brain is destroyed.

But even if it was possible to scan a brain, I think you are underestimating the task of creating an artificial brain. Storage is the least of our troubles. To actually simulate the neural net, each of these two thousand hard drives must be connected to every other one, requiring millions of interconnects, and then you need millions of processors, and every simulation step touches every byte of every hard drive. This is so many orders of magnitude beyond what we can do now that I doubt it is ever possible.

I think the only feasible way of uploading a brain will be to create a program that can convince everyone that the uploaded person is actually living inside the computer, similar to the Turing test. You'd configure the program by telling it anecdotes from your life and taking psychological tests, rather than "scan your brain". However, I consider even this variant unlikely, because it would basically require something similar to an AI.