Mind Uploading and The Future Of Brain Digitization
A Concept That Will Prolong Our Lives Indefinitely.
Whole brain emulation (WBE), mind upload or brain upload (sometimes called “mind copying” or “mind transfer”) is the hypothetical futuristic process of scanning the mental state of a particular brain substrate and copying it to a computer.
Mind Uploading is a person’s brain that could be scanned in great detail and recreated in a computer reproduction. The person’s mind and memories, emotions, foresight and personality would be copied. For the greatest part, a new and equally valid version of that person would now exist, in a potentially immortal, digital form.
The ultimate goal of mind uploading is to transfer someone’s personality into a completely new body. And this involves creating an artificial brain that would hold the original individual consciousness.
Achieving immortality and prolonging our lives endlessly has long been humanity’s desire. Although advancements in medicine have enabled us to significantly increase our lifetime, legitimate immortality has remained unattainable. Realizing physical immortality may very well be beyond our capabilities, but achieving digital immortality may be a possibility with rapid advancements in technology including developments in neurosciences.
Presently, when a generation of people die, we lose all their collective knowledge, foresight and intelligence. It may be possible to transmit part of the knowledge to the next generation, but it’s harder to transmit experience, which is learned and our children will have to learn from the same faults.
The US startup Nectome wants to upload our mind to the cloud and developed technology for exquisitely preserving brains in microscopic detail using a high-tech embalming process which could help back up our mind. The technology Nectome and others are working on could have many other useful applications such as brain stacking for future research into health and diseases or help us discover new drugs for brain disorders.
Some futurists believe that humans will achieve digital immortality by uploading their minds to computers, and human minds will be digitized in coming years. Further they believe that our brains will be uploaded to the cloud or internet and they see good reasons to save a copy of oneself somewhere.
Specifically, they believe that in a few decades, humans will be able to upload their minds to a computer or a robot, surpassing the need for a biological body. The reality is that neural engineering is making significant strides toward developing technologies to restore, rescue or replace some of the brain biological functions.
Some visionaries introduced the concept of “mindclones” — digital versions of humans that can live forever and described how the mind clones are created from a “mindfile,” a sort of online repository of our personalities (example Facebook, etc.) which would be run on “mindware,” a kind of software built for consciousness.
In parallel with the talk of brain technologies and mind-uploading, much was said about the nature of consciousness in the universe. Physicist Roger Penrose and others disagree with the analysis of the brain as a mere computer and argued that consciousness is a quantum mechanical phenomenon in addition to think that uploading the brain would have to involve quantum computers — a development unlikely to happen in near future.
The human brain is a complex organ, consisting of about 86 billion neurons that constantly exchange information . All of the connections between the neurons in a brain are called the connectome, and scientists believe that this connectome actually holds the information that makes us distinctive. And mapping it could potentially allow us to recreate a person’s mind. If we could find a way to map and scan the brain at the necessary level of detail with enough computing power to run such a reproduction, then we should be able to recreate the human mind in a computer. However, neuroscientists feel it’s a very remote possibility at this point as we are far away from mapping a human connectome alone.
Imagine one day we go into a mind uploading clinic to have our brain scanned. If the technology works perfectly and then it captures all our synapses in sufficient detail to recreate our unique mind. It gives that mind a virtual body with face and voice attached, in a virtual environment and if all of this has come true then mind uploading would enable valid version of that person exist indefinitely.
There are practical and ethical issues of mind uploading, and experts question the personal identity whether this person is still the same after successfully uploading human mind onto a computer with memories ? Since there is no existence of physical body anymore and the digital person would essentially reduced to a stream of knowledge, who would that knowledge belong to and who would control it? Also other issues like the rights this digital person have, and if one creates multiple copies of himself then which one of those copies is the ‘real’ one.
The recent developments in science of the brain and of consciousness increasingly suggests that mind uploading is possible. The technology is likely to be far into our future; it may be few decades before the details are fully evolved and yet given how much interest, effort and funding is already directed towards that goal, mind uploading seems inevitable. Of course we do not know how it might affect our lives but as the technology of quantum computers and brain’s neural network shapes up, we can only guess that mind uploading in future could be a possibility.
