In “San Junipero,” two women named Kelly and Yorkie meet in a beachside town and form a special connection. As the episode unfolds, however, we learn this isn’t any simple tourist destination, but a virtual reality playground for the dead and terminally ill, where you’re assigned era-specific outfits and dope Barbie cars. As each creeps closer to death in the flesh, the two grapple with whether they should continue their relationship in the virtual world,  to “pass over” rather than “pass away.” In other words, they live in a future where they can choose to either disappear, or have a replica of their human consciousness uploaded to the all-powerful cloud, existing in a fantasy land forever.

I don’t think it’s possible, because  transferring our consciousness to a computer to be remotely feasible, not only would we need a computer capable of handling the computational load of our brains and of replicating the complicated web of neural connections, we’d also need a method for transferring the parts of our brains that make us who we are to a computer: our memories, our unique way of processing information, our personal quirks, all into a digital format. The things we don’t know about the brain vastly outnumber the things that we do know, making building an artificial brain a tough task.