Space Travel Tip #32
There are many wonders to avoid in the Galactic neighborhood. One thing for all biological intelligences to avoid is anything promising to transfer your mind into anything else.
An important thing to remember to not forget, is that your mind, whether it is focused in a brain or dispersed throughout your body in several sub-brains, is your mind. It cannot be transferred into something else. The things which make you yourself are physically encompassed within the meat or stone or xylem matrix which is your mind.
Consider the offer made by some machine intelligences: let us transfer your mind into a virtual wonderland, limited only by your own imagination. First off, most sentient life is not emotionally stable enough to be trusted with their “own imagination”; more often than not, this scenario is a virtual hell.
This transference happens in one of two ways, though the means may differ: a copy of your mind is made and put into the virtual world, or you are physically attached, “plugged” directly into, whatever is generating the world. If it is only your copy living virtually, that is the best case scenario; it is not actually you, but you can now keep a mental clone of yourself in a flashdrive. The second scenario requires extensive brain surgery to get into and extensive brain surgery to get out of, and the surgeons have absolute control of the situation; I, personally, don’t trust like that.
