It depends on what consciousness turns out to be. If it's 'just' electrical signals in the brain... then I think we should be able to 'copy' that into another body of sorts. Which brings up another interesting consideration.... copying... Could you create an identical secondary consciousness?!

Personally I am of the belief that consciousness is like a piece of biological software. It doesn't really 'exist' when the switch is turned off and it's not tangible or touchable because of exists in the signals between it's parts. But if that's so I don't see how we couldn't be able to reproduce it somehow, even if that is still years away from being discovered.

I guess we should expect some things to be different. Maybe some parts of being human will be lost in the translation to a digital consciousness. Not sure if that's good or bad.. it sounds bad right now, but maybe there are advantages as well. Or maybe it's just different, or atleast not dead per se.