OK, little electro-chemical impulses form the stuff of our thoughts and so presumably our very consciousness is a bunch of electrical patterns, so my thoughts and my feelings are the software running on the squishy bits inside my skull. So could my consciousness exist outside my body? If it could would it be able to reside somewhere else.

Could it ever end up matrix style in a machine? If what I know as me, that which gazes out through the windows of my eyes is not the body but the body is just the house my mind lives in then could mind travel on its own to other places? Would I have anyway of knowing that what I perceive as real is the same reality as others experience?

When I shuffle off the mortal coil is all that information lost as the electrochemical stuff powers down. Who knows. There is no beer in the fridge either. With this amazing human mind perhaps I could imagine a beer then imagine drinking it which would certainly be more economical though less satisfying than fizzy liquid from a cold place. I am trying that experiment as I type and so far its not working other than I am getting rather thirsty. Yet an imagined beer ought to taste as good as an actual one surely?

In places in the universe where time runs at a different rate would our little electrical patterns live for ever, perhaps orbiting a rotating black hole?