Joe: The idea is really fascinating to me.  Are you familiar with [Raymond] Ray Kurzweil? Do you know who that guy is? - 'The singularity is near'.  He is the number one proponent of the idea of the intelligent computer eventually taking over.  And that's what he deems 'the singularity' to be, and what he thinks is that, what immortality is going to be is that you're going to be able to download your consciousness into some sort of a computer.  And, you know, it sounds completely ridiculous until you start thinking about; what the fuck is consciousness? - and what if they can re-create it?  What if you can re-create and create an artificial version of consciousness? - down to the point of it being non-local.  Down to the point of this computer that you've created being an antenna to tune in this new sort of consciousness.  

Dave Foley: Yea.  I remember once that they were talking about, that if computers continue to advance at the rate they're doing...I don't remember if it was Kurzweil...the idea that, eventually there will be a computer powerful enough to have stored in its memory banks, ever single event that has occurred since the big bang.  Which means like, every event in every human beings life.  Every interaction of matter throughout the universe, could be stored on a single computer. 

Joe: and can be extrapolated based on the current events. 

Dave Foley: Yea.  And he said that the program itself, would not be able to distinguish itself from the original.  So each of us would be programed into this computers' memory bank.  And the program of us, would not be able to distinguish itself from the original.  Which means that right now, we might already be that program, a billion years in the future.  

Joe: So we may very well be some sort of a parallel reality...?

Dave Foley: Well, we may have lived our actual carbon-based life a billion years ago, and right now we might just be the computer program being run a billion years later. 

Redban: So trippy

Joe:  Woah, what a mind-fuck.  

Episode #82 of The JRE podcast @ -14:19