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The only self aware entity that I know of is myself. Because other humans look and behave a lot like me, I assume they are self-aware too. With animals, the line starts to blur, large mammals have a similar body structure and have reaction that, from my own experience, appear to be the result of self awareness, but when we get down to worms that can be computer-simulated, I am not so sure.

So how will we be able to know if something as alien as an AI is self-aware? Maybe it already is. I mean, isn't it painful for a program when you throw an exception? Obviously, we don't interpret as pain, because we know it is just a flow control instruction. But from a functional point of view, it signals your code to stop doing what it is doing and deal with the problem in order to prevent further damage, maybe with a mechanism to prevent the error from occurring again. It is just like pain for us.

It would be great if every sensationalist story about AI or its future on /. contained a link to the openworm project. You see, when we cannot yet understand how 302 neurons work, it takes quite a leap of imagination to think that we'll create AGI any time soon. There's just too much of a leap from AI (more like very specialized algos for certain tasks) to AGI (which is capable of solving the tasks in has never seen before in any form or shape).

You may be interested in OpenWorm. See: http://www.openworm.org/

They are working on simulating a worm. We can't replace individual neurons, but C. elegans is simple enough that we might be able to simulate it to the degree that we really understand it. An insect is way, way beyond what we can do now, and of course even simple vertebrates are a pipe dream. But, we're making progress. It's an open question of exactly which processes we need to simulate at what level.

As for replacing individual neurons, you'd have to know what they do in situ. Obviously, they receive signals, and they fire off other signals, but the strength of the connections change over time, the intercellular environment changes, the overall level of activity changes, they age, etc., so it's not just replacing a single neuron with a static piece of electronics; it would have to have both short and long term dynamics, and we would have to know what they are. And we don't yet.

Like Open Worm?

Is it really alive? http://www.openworm.org/

Transhumanism is currently a hodgepodge of religious nonsense, visionary science fiction, and practical self-improvement. I confess I am a bit swept up in the romantic ideal of it. I love the idea of human improveability in the form of intellectual and technological advancement, extended lifespans, higher quality of life, and even post-scarcity economies.

The religious nonsense part of it is best embodied in Ray Kurzweil's singularity (also known as the nerd rapture), the idea that humanity will soon upload our minds to computers and live forever. I can't imagine us not having this technology before the end of the century--especially with efforts like the UK's Human Brain Project and America's BRAIN Initiative AND a proof of concept with researchers mapping a worm's brain into a legobot and having it "come alive". HOWEVER: I also don't pin any personal hopes for immortality on this research because we are making copies of our minds, so even if my mind joins the singularity, I will still die--probably bitterly jealous of my immortal self having all that virtual sex in technoheaven.

For me, the science fiction of transhumanism is all about vision and inspiration, and not about dreams of salvation and immortality like Kurzweil promotes. The science fiction part of it is most accessible through Star Trek, but in reality our transhumanist future will probably be more like the wild visions of Charles Stross' Accelerando, or my personal favorite the Quantum Thief Trilogy by Hannu Rajaniemi. These books drop you into settings filled with Matrioshka brains (Dyson Spheres made of computronium), and force the reader to confront all the uncomfortable otherness that comes with virtual life.

Another great science fiction resource is the Creative Commons Eclipse Phase RPG, which takes place in a future where humanity has colonized solar system and extended out into the Oort Cloud. Each planet and environment requiring different engineering and culture adaptations to survive. You can download all the books in PDF format. These books are a fantastic jumping-point for the imagining what a post-human future might look like.

This all said, I am not a fan of Sirius' encyclopedia. I was looking for practical, real-world things I can do right now to enhance my life through science and technology. Instead, I got very thin treatments of many subjects, overstatements of medical advances, important subjects left out (like the 19th Century Russian Cosmism movement (precursor to transhumanism)), and a general lack of leads to new areas to research. I get way more information from Wikipedia-surfing than I got from this book. I do appreciate his efforts though. If he gets more people into the idea of transhumanism, then more people will collaborate on it, we'll have more hacks for better living, and more people thinking about the future and human progress.

What we really need is a human body simulator, down to the molecules.

That would be nice, but rather un-realistic currently. We are currently working on a worm, and you can see progress at: http://www.openworm.org/ . It's cool, cutting edge, open source, and all that, but 1. the models are really complicated and we don't know all the parameters; and 2. they take a long time to run. In a couple of years, we should (cross fingers) be able to see the effect of chemicals on a nematode, so if it gets sick, we can simulate treating it.

Please note that C. elegans has 959 cells in it. Humans have 100 billion neurons. We're still many, many orders of magnitude off from simulating the effect of drugs on a human body.