First of all, this Freeman character is either misrepresented (in the
article) or a crackpot, probably the former. That article wasn't
cognitive science, it was New Age philosophy with a slightly larger
syllable count.
Leaving that aside, at present there is no conscious entity redesigning
its brain on a neuron-by-neuron basis. There is a limited amount of
neural power available to the brain. No more than, say, 7.5 meg of
information is used to build the thing (assuming 1% of the genome is
devoted.) We are evolved to hunt and gather, not do mathematics or
design computers.
http://tezcat.com/~eliezer/singularity.html#PT describes how to build an
intuitive understanding of numbers into a Power, or how the Powers might
view the whole of human knowledge in a single flash of experience, and
how to continue the process. The basic concept is that of a "Perceptual
Transcend", which occurs when the semantic structures become semantic
primitives.
All in all, I'd say that uploading to computer presents a tremendous
range of new possibilities.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://tezcat.com/~eliezer/singularity.html
http://tezcat.com/~eliezer/algernon.html
Disclaimer: Unless otherwise specified, I'm not telling you
everything I know.