In the recent movie chappie they figured out how to transfer consciousness into a computer program. This doesn't seem possible given my perception of what consciousness is. As far as I know consciousness is the result of a functioning brain and when that brain dies consciousness ends. I can believe you could mimic the computations a brain would make but being "sucked in" to a virtual existence as portrayed in the movie seems short sighted. Am I wrong?

yeah more likely it will be a copy rather than a transfer. so while you may think you are the original you never would be the same person you were copied from.

so you could die and let a copy of yourself live on if you went full hardware or you could go cyborg which would be the easiest way to be yourself and a machine.

We don't know what consciousness is let alone if it can be transferred

watch Caprica imo

Chappie...

why would u even question if its story line can be possible...
just the process of extracting and importing ur consciousness makes it impossible for the robot to send its "chappie brain" to another robot, the way he did in the movie.
same goes for the human to robot thing...
how does, wearing that helmet transfers ur consciousness to the robot head in the first place... its brain is not in the head... and even if they made the effort to make it more believable and
tried to connect the human brain with the "chip" in the back of the robot, it wouldnt work because the brain is vastly more developed...

the human brain requires just 20 watts of energy to function. with todays technology a robots processor as smart as the human brain would require at least 10 megawatts.
10 megawatts is the amount of energy produced by a small hydroelectric plant
20 watts is the amount of energy needed to run a dim light bulb.

u do the math

It is not only that we don't understand consciousness.

Even our subconscious plays a big role (probably even a bigger role and influence) in our consciousness. Even if you were to somehow transplant your consciousness into some machine, you would not be the same person because you'd be missing a ton of stuff that helps make up who you are. Example of this is ur pituitary gland responsible for regulation of hormones, your own inherent tendencies, a lot of things are not even controlled by us directly and yet they impact our consciousness on a big level.

I haven't seen the film, but if physicalism is true then of course consciousness can't be "transferred" since consciousness is a physical phenomenon; to "transfer" it would merely be to move it to another spatiotemporal location. If physicalism isn't true then we still couldn't transfer consciousness because even if the physical has causal efficacy over the phenomenal, it would again just involve spatiotemporal relocation. Really the whole concept of consciousness transfer is, in my opinion, confused, and is due to a misconception of personal identity. Consciousness cannot be transplanted from one physical system to another because consciousness is what it's like to be a particular physical system.

Personally I'm skeptical of serial computationalism and think it will require breakthroughs in quantum computing to be able to develop conscious robots (due to the combination problem/binding problem).

number 5... is.... alive