Steven Pinker, while discussing consciousness in his book “How the Mind Works” offers an interesting thought experiment.

Surgeons replace one of your neurons with a microchip that duplicates its input output functions. You feel and behave exactly as before. Then they replace a second one, and the third one, and so on, until more and more of your brain becomes silicon. Since each microchip does exactly what the neuron did, your behavior in memory never change. Do you even notice the difference? Does it feel like dying? Is some other conscious entity moving in with you?

This relates to my contemplations on how the learning process affects neurons. As I mentioned, learning is a process of connecting the synaptic connections between different neurons. Now, let’s say I decided I wanted to learn how to play “Whip It” on the violin, without actually having to practice the violin. In theory, if I knew which synaptic connections to strengthen, I could just tweak them and the problem would be solved. The main stumbling block with that is that everyone’s got a different set of neurons, and whereas we might know the general area in the brain where “violin playing” neurons reside, we can’t locate the specific neurons in a specific person. But let’s say we did indeed replace the neurons in one person’s head with microchips. During that process, we would have to catalogue each neuron/microchip, and we could figure out the “violin playing” neuron/microchips. And thus one could learn to play violin in the second. (That’s not quite true; there’s still the issue of building your muscle strength up.)

It becomes more obvious that the man the future will look back at his predecessors (us) and laugh at our vast inferiority.