Cognitive architectures are... Leibnizian machines... designed to bring forth the feats of cognition, and built to allow us to enter... examine them,… - Joscha Bach

Minds are software states... Software doesn't have identity. Software in some sense is a physical law. ...The maintenance of the identity is not terminal. It's instrumental to something else. You maintain your identity so you can serve your meaning. So you can do the things that you are supposed to do before you die. ...For most people the fear of death is the fear of dying before they are done with the things that they feel they have to do even though they cannot quite put their finger on... what that is.

How difficult is it to define a brain? We know that the brain must be somewhere hidden in the genome [which] fits in a CD-ROM. It's not that complicated. It's easier than Microsoft Windows. ...[A]bout 2% of the genome is coding for proteins, and maybe about 10%... tells you when to express which protein, and the remainder is mostly garbage. It's old viruses that are left over and it's never been properly deleted [etc.] because there are no real code revisions in the genome. ...How much of this 10%, [i.e.,] about 75 megabytes code for the brain, we don't really know. What we do know is that we share almost all of this with mice. Genetically speaking, a human is a pretty big mouse, with a few bits changed to fix some of the genetic expressions. ...Most of the stuff there is going to code for cells and metabolism and what your body looks like, [etc.]...

For Turing it wasn't quite so bad. ...[T]uring could see that the solution is to understand that mathematics was computational all along. ...For instance pi in classical mathematics is a value. It's also a function, but it's the same thing. In computation, a function is only a value when you can compute it, and if you cannot compute the last digit of pi, you only have a function. You can plug this function into your local sun, let it run until the sun burns out... This is it. This is the last digit of pi you will know. But it also means that there can be no process in the physical universe, or in any physically realized computer that depends on having known the last digit of pi. ...Which means that there are parts of physics that are defined in such a way that cannot strictly be true, because, assuming that this could be true leads into contradictions.