This chapter is about what it means to believe that the Singularity is near.
In the first part Kurzweil spends a lot of time on what it means to prepare for the possibility of immortality being close at hand. He is an optimist and he devotes time and money, research and effort to lengthening his lifespan. He figures he has a good chance of successfully surfing the Longevity Wave. (Ray was born the same year as I was, 1948, so I'm paying close attention to how likely he is to be right in his effort.)
He moves from this to reflecting on the question of, "If he does become immortal in some sense, is he still human? Or is he now post-human?"
And from that he moves on to the question of what is consciousness? Even in this day of fast accelerating science knowledge of how the human brain operates, discovering and defining consciousness is hard. And then comes the second question: Can consciousness and emotions be uploaded to the external network? (And then the third question that I thought of: Even if you can, do you really want to? Consciousness and emotions may be as useful in the external network as buggy whips are when you have automobiles -- I think there is a good chance they may be replaced by technology surprise uses of thinking that are much, much more interesting.)
These are the issues of this chapter.