Star Trek: What are Little Girls Made Of?

I haven't seen this episode for years. It does seem a little campy now and the scenes where Kirk is using his mojo on the female android and getting ready to strike Rock with a giant phallic symbol are hysterical. Bottom line though, it was not only entertaining but did raise some interesting questions about what makes a person human. Our bodies are imperfect and designed to break down over mere decades, who wouldn't want their essence transferred to a theoretically immortal body so that they could go on and not be ravished by diseases and time? The questions that were raise are as poignant today as forty years ago when the episode originally aired. Can more than just data from our memory be transferred to a computer? Can we someday somehow transfer consciousness or is the consciousness by its definition something only organic life forms can possess? I believe as we learn more about the human mind and as machines progress, we will someday be able to bridge the gap. Two things that I think will be needed: the human minds ability to hold contradictory ideas together, not as black or white, but somehow to understand the contradictory nature of existence. Also, there will have to be different programs working on different levels that somehow mimic our id, superego and ego working together unconsciously. We are not there yet, but as our readings pointed out, man's consciousness arose from much more humble beginnings. Who is to say the machines won't evolve (with our help) to consciousness.