Episode 8: Ditch Your Meat Body

It is very possible that in the distant future science will figure out how to create a virtual world that looks, sounds, smells and feels like reality, in essence, The Matrix. Some current scientists and theorist believe that human memory is so similar to computer memory, that is a matter of time before your brain can be uploaded in a computer virtual reality construct, allowing one to live eternally in a digital world. 

This week the Sci-Fi Malady crew discusses the Black Mirror Episode San Junipero, a virtual world where the dead have uploaded their consciousness and the terminally ill visit weekly for five hours. We discuss first how in our opinion, this is an amazingly well written piece of science fiction and we wish there was more stories like this, and secondly, the moral and ethical implications of San Junipero. 

Is a virtual world real? What if you could experience love in that artificial world? Can you actually upload yourself into a computer, or would that just become an algorithm running as an independent program in a greater program? Are "you" really just your neural pathways and synapses, or is there that as of yet unidentified soul that gives us spark of life, a thing that can't be transferred into a computer?