See Anders Sandberg's paper on mind uploading

From GEB

Probably the differences between Al programs and people will be larger than the differences between most people. It is almost impossible to imagine that the "body" in which an Al program is hous ed would not affect it deeply. So unless it had an amazingly faithful replica of a human body-and why should it?-it would probably have enormously different persp ectives on what is important, what is interesting, etc. Wittgenstein once made the amusing comment, "If a lion could speak, we would not understand him." It makes me think of Rousseau's painting of the gentle lion and the sleeping gypsy on the moonlit desert. But how does Wittgenstein know? My guess is that any Al program would, if comprehensible to us, seem pretty alien. For that reason, we will have a very hard time deciding when and if we really are dealing with an Al program, or just a "weird" program.

Philosophy in the flesh / being there.

Where mathematics comes from

Why 26 letters? That comes from the limitations of speech. We want a language designed for writing. For egiptians, they decided to enrich their language iconographically. Chinese chose syllables as well as iconography. Most western languages chose phonemes. Typewriters, and now computers bring a different set of constraints. This gave rise to qwerty and vim. Touchscreens allowed for swipe. See Input device, Output device, Human-computer interaction