OK it's a decently entertaining lecture but for those that are too impatient the bottom line is that this guy thinks that soon we're going to be able to modify our own brains and enter a new stage of evolution. Since the driving force behind this evolution won't be natural selection, we will evolve at an unnaturally fast rate. Is this possible?

The brain is a lot like a computer(to me at least). At the lowest level of a computer software we have machine language, simple 1 and 0s that conduct how the computer is operated. No one can look at machine language and understand what function it has. Thus people created assembly language, to "translate" machine language into something more recognizable by humans. By today's standards, it is still a very very simple low level language which can only manipulate symbols and signals. Thus people continue to create more and more complex computer languages in order to allow us to write more complex programs. Yet in the end, the most complex programs can be translated back to machine language, simple 1s and 0s.

In that sense, although to us the difference between a computer and human seems obvious (flexibility, predictability, self consciousness) and impossible to simulate perfectly, it is only because the technology we see is too simple. When machines get more and more complex and the amount of inputs and outputs becomes too large, even the creator of the machine can not fully predict how it will act. Kind of like how I'm pretty certain that this computer will not fail me while I'm writing this blog but every once in a while it's going to poop out and shut down on me.

If we are able to understand our brain at certain levels of complexity, it may be possible to manipulate them in predictable (and unpredictable) ways. Even more interesting, I think, is the possibility of separating the brain's functions from the physical brain, and thus having the ability to transfer our "software" to a hard drive. When the ghost is allowed to escape the shell, is this what we call immortality?