Do you really think it's impossible in principle, or just prohibitively difficult (as I believe interstellar travel to be)?
I don't think we will "transfer" our consciousness to anything else. I think that's impossible.
Do you really think it's impossible in principle, or just prohibitively difficult (as I believe interstellar travel to be)?
I think it is impossible in principle. That is, the idea that you could wake up in some machine body after undergoing a transfer procedure is impossible. We will build machines that are just as intellectually capable and "alive" as ourselves, but they will be their own selves.
The think our minds are constructs of our brains and although we might be able to build machines as capable we can't move into them unless we can put our brains in them and keep them alive. Even if we could somehow download the information content of our brains to a machine, that machine would be a copy. It wouldn't be me any more than my clone is me.