Thoughts from four decades on the subject of artificial beings with consciousness and thus on the question of what humans can find out about themselves beyond metaphysics. It turns out in this matter that the solution to the problem is to implement the problem. The book contains the core theory from 1991 on the construction principles of a "Mr. Data" (the android from the sci-fi series Star Trek: The Next Generation). The theory was the subject of a discussion with Valentin Braitenberg at the Max-Planck-Institute in Tübingen, Germany.