What if we could transfer our conscious into a computer?

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Yes, I don't recall all the details of the book but I think for instance there were initially some explorers to relatively nearby stars (like Alpha Centauri) at fast but still sub-light speeds. They brought with them the equipment to receive the transmissions of these "stacks" of memories . I seem to recall in the book that these transmissions somehow occurred faster than light, but if so I don't think there was really much detail about how it was supposed to happen.

In any case the interesting part of the book is how these downloadable memories could lead to a kind of immortality - at least for the wealthy who could afford new bodies and who could have their stacks backed up periodically - if you died you could be restored either to whatever was current in your stack if the physical stack (located in the base of the skull) survived your death - but if your death was violent and the physical stack was damaged, you could only be restored to life if your stack was backed up outside of your body at a backup center - and then only with memories as of the time of the most recent backup. So this tended in the book to take away some of the stigma of murder, and lead to the concept of "real death" in the sense of threatening to kill someone and destroy their stack if they didn't have a backup, as opposed to a "fake" death in which their memories would survive to be implanted in another body, even if their current body were to be killed.

Considering that the brain is on the basic level just electric and chemical signals, creating a copy is feasible. However we do not understand nearly enough about the brain yet. If we did know that much about the brain I'm sure we would be at the point where any conditions of the brain would be possible to fix which would make the need for a copy of our brains obsolete.

brainstorm was a 1982 movie about an experimental apparatus which could copy/record thoughts/experience memories out of people's heads, and transfer those thoughts to another brain. it was a quasi-technological horror movie.

OK, looked it up on wiki. It rings a bell. Think I saw it in my teens.
Thanks!