The Human Consciousness

There was an interesting episode of Stargate SG-1 on TV recently -- in this story, one of the characters has the consciousness of multiple people "downloaded" into his body. The idea that consciousness is a "seperate" entity from the body, and could be possibly transferred into another body, or a machine (mainly a result of the computational theory of the mind) is a recurring idea in science fiction, as well as in serious research. Problem is "consciousness" is an extremely tricky term. What is it anyway? What makes us conscious? Are animals conscious too? No easy answers here.....

Ray Kurzweil has two interesting thought experiments regarding consciousness (I actually thought of the first one too, but he beat me to it...tch :) )
# 1 Make an exact copy of yourself (say make a robot that looks exactly like you, is programmed with ALL your behaviors, has your thoughts and memories). For everyone else, your copy is YOU. However, for you, the copy is NOT you.....
# 2 Start replacing your brain bit by bit with an artifical equivalent, which performs the same function as that particular part. At the conclusion of the procedure, you still think that you are YOU. So what is the difference between you before the procedure and you after?

Lots of food for thought!

A~