Memory is so cheap today…and the avaerage PC now has a 50 GB hard drive? So, for you computer types,how long will it be until we can store the entire contents of a human brain in RAM? We don’t have to store the brain stuff relating to eating, making love, etc. (for obvious reasons, these will not be necessary). Is this a practical way of achieveing immortality? Can we reproduce personality, given enough memory storage capacity?
Sure beats being frozen…and hoping some idiot janitor in 2300 AD doesn’t pull the freezer plug out by mistake!
Is it even possible to contemplate “loading” the stored memories into another human brain? This would make immortality a practical reality!
How would I go about doing this? 
“I haven;t lost my mind. It’s backed up on disc somewhere”
– Nancy Leibowitz Button.
If you can store yourself on disc, could you download several versions of yourself into host bodies? Would they cooperate, or get into arguments? Would versions downloaded from later copies use their superior knowledge to lord it over earlier dowloads?
A few practical difficulties:
- I don’t see any way of ‘reading’ the data from the entire brain at a sufficient level of detail without destroying it.
-It is very different from a digital computer memory; the electrochemical status of the neurons AND their physical configuration are both highly significant - I’m guessing, but I think it would take quite a considerable chunk of memory just to store the exact properties of a single neuron - the amount of memory required will increase out of proportion to the number of neurons you are mapping.
-Even if you DO manage to make the backup, it isn’t any use unless you have a device on which you can restore it - and making an exact replica of the physical configuration of your brain, so that you can then (somehow) impose the electrochemical data on it is probably very close to impossible.
-The 'stuff relating to eating, making love, etc. ’ isn’t nearly as separate from the ‘stuff that makes you YOU’, if at all.
In short, the concept works well in SF, where practical difficulties can just be glossed over.