Add to ORKGRay Kurzweil, author of The Age of Spiritual Machines, maintains that conscious artificial machines will be possible within the next century, that we will be soon replacing parts, if not all, of our bodies with silicon, downloading information and experiences, cloning ourselves, and living forever in our new bodies. Such predictions spark some fundamental questions: What is consciousness and from where does it come? Can we find an objective way to understand consciousness and the truth of reality? Is consciousness something we can reproduce? And why do people like Kurzweil think so? This project is an attempt to understand and answer these questions, beginning with an exploration of the history of the pervading western philosophy of materia...