Gary Stix reviews Sebastian Seung's Connectome, a book named after the "complete circuit diagram of the brain," which some hope will allow us to make digital copies of brains. The main philosophical question:
The central question for [Seung, a computational neuroscientist from MIT] —and the one that also keeps the transhumanists on tenterhooks—is whether you are your connectome. If you could deduce every connection point of every brain cell, the strength with which each neuron fires, and the way these firing patterns change as the cells interact with each other, would, in fact, you be left with a copy of you?
The Dish 