We’re Cracking the Neural Code

I still find that Christians are not really willing to engage with neurotheology but it's going to become increasingly important as this quote shows...

If the brain’s programming tricks can be transferred to computers and robots,... mastery of the neural code might allow us to transform our psyches into software programs – strings of ones and zeros – that can be downloaded into machines, where we will live forever in cyberspace.
Finally, the neural code could represent the key to one of philosophy’s oldest and deepest conundrums – the mind-body problem – in the following way: all codes involve the transformation of purely physical phenomena ... into information, which transcends the physical realm. By revealing how the brain transforms a physical process such as the firing of a neuron into information and even meaning, another non-physical phenomena, the neural code may reveal how mere matter becomes a mind. Who knows? Maybe we’ll even solve the riddle of free will. We may finally understand how this wrinkled lump of jelly in our skulls generates a unique self with a sense of personal identity and autonomy, a self that perceives, emotes, remembers, imagines, chooses, acts, creates.

It will mean we have to do some good thinking about emergence, evolution, the nature of the soul and free will. I actually don't find any of this threatening, I think that we have the resources in Christian tradition to say in principle that we have been 'here' before, but for Christians who think that a Cartesian soul is the only reading of Christian anthropology that is possible and orthodox there are hard times ahead.
Adbusters : The Magazine - #63 The Big Ideas of 2006 / We’re Cracking the Neural Code, the Brain’s Secret Language:
Filed in: brain, body, AI, neural_code