Can Our Minds Be Uploaded to a Computer?
It’s early morning on New Year’s Day 2075. I’m sitting in my living room with a cup of coffee and watching the snow fall. The fireplace is throwing off heat as the logs slowly vanish. I’m enjoying a conversation with my twin “brother” who inhabits a small but powerful laptop computer that sits on a table with a view of our garden. Mike2, as we agreed to call him, doesn’t drink coffee or anything else. He is my uploaded brain.
Today is Mike2’s “birthday.” Three years ago, two technicians from Eternal Life Brain Scans came to my home and uploaded my connectome on New Year’s Day 2047. It took a painless forty-five minutes. My children had encouraged me to replicate my brain so that they would “never lose me.”
At that time there were two methods for “mind uploading.” The first was a destructive uploading called “copy-and-delete.” This procedure harvested the organic brain’s neurons and synapses (the connectome) until the original brain vanished and its owner died. The entire connectome would then download into a computer program that accurately emulated the brain and mind. Those with fatal or incurable diseases generally chose this path.
A more expensive and much more complicated technique, “copy-and-preserve” had no adverse effect on the owner’s organic original brain. As I was in good physical shape for my age, I decided against housing my uploaded brain in an anatomic body-simulation android. I felt it would be a little too creepy to have another “me” walking around the house.
Mike2 and I have had an ongoing conversation for the past three years. Just as identical twins change as they have different life experiences, he and I have developed different world views. We disagree about so many things. He pointed out this morning with an invisible smile that life was good in the digital universe that he inhabited. I knew that he had a sort of body and could move through his space.
I also knew he depended on this to help him from feeling lonely. When he was first uploaded, he wanted me to describe my days in great detail. But recently he spends more time telling me what he’s experiencing. I learned that there are other minds in the universe he now inhabits. I’ve met a few and had some conversations; Not the usual type of conversations we usually engage in with other humans, but a sort of “mind melding” a la the Vulcan Spock on Star Trek. Some have existed in this digital universe since uploading began.
Mapping the Connectome
Many of the tools and ideas needed to achieve mind uploading already exist or are currently under active development. Others are, as yet, very speculative, but in the realm of engineering possibility.
Our brains consist of neurons and synapses. A neuron is a cell that communicates though electrical impulses with other cells by means of connections called synapses. The connectome is a comprehensive map of these neural connections in the brain.
Neuroscientists have currently mapped the connectome of the simple 1 mm-long roundworm, whose brain contains just 302 neurons and 7000 connections. In contrast, the human brain has 100 billion neurons and a million billion synaptic connections. Scientists estimate that our brains house the same number of neurons as there are stars in the Milky Way. Clearly, mapping the human brain’s connectome is a daunting task.
Immortality Through “Mind Loading”
The human brain is a three-pound biological organ; the physical entity where the mind resides. The mind, conversely, is not tangible, having neither weight nor form. The mind is instead the manifestation of the thoughts, perceptions, emotions, determinations, memories and imaginations that takes place within the brain: our consciousness.
With sufficient computing power, we could scan the human brain’s connectome and upload it onto a computer. Neuroscientists call this “mind loading.” We would need an immensely powerful computer to accomplish this. Such “supercomputers” are in our future. Another possibility is the development of a working quantum computer which would surpass today’s most powerful computers by several orders of magnitude.
But even more impressive than the computing power necessary to make it happen is the possibility that the uploaded connectome of a human brain could become an independent being — a digital personality with different memories and perhaps even more powerful information processing abilities than the original.
But would it also have a mind and a sense of self?
Neuroscientists speculate that the uploaded brain would react to stimuli the same as an organic brain. If the subsequent stimuli were different for the digital brain, then the mind that developed would also be different. However, the brain/mind in the computer would also be free of the physical limitations of a mortal being making it immortal — as long as a power supply was available. For this reason, it would be prudent to house a uploaded brain into several computers in case one fails.
Exploring the Universe
In the introduction to every episode of Star Trek, the narrator says of the captain and crew that their mission is to “go where no man has gone before.” That possibility will become a reality, when we learn to upload a brain and send it into space.
The astrophysicist Michio Kaku posits that when we digitize a human connectome, we could use a laser to send it into space to a computer waiting to upload our data. This method avoids the dangers of space travel. Hypothetically, we could beam our consciousness to any location in space where we have placed a receiver/computer.
Michio Kaku points out that our corporeal bodies are not designed for interstellar travel. But we can open up the universe to our species once we can download a brain. Sending a downloaded-brain astronaut into space instead of a “live” body would have many advantages. We need not worry about the negative impacts of zero gravity, radiation and the vacuum of space. This would enable voyages that could last beyond a human lifetime.
The advantages of this “laser porting” technique over conventional space travel are intriguing. Our uploaded brains could reach the moon in about 1.25 seconds, the time it takes electromagnetic waves to travel the earth-moon distance: about 240,000 miles. Using this method, we could travel to Mars in 20 minutes. Or we could laser port to a nearby star, Alpha Centauri, about four light years away, once a receiver is in place.
Now imagine that your brain is uploaded into an avatar, a humanoid robot, placed at each destination. This enables “you” to walk around in a silicon-based body and enjoy the advantages over living in a computer. You could have breakfast in New York, go for a stroll on the moon after lunch, travel to Mars for tea in the afternoon, then return to Earth that evening.
Will it one day be possible? Returning again to my imagined brother Mike2, I begin to speculate on what I am missing by being stuck in my biological body, tethered to the world I have always inhabited. I will die, but so long as the computer Mike2 inhabits is functioning, he will live on. One day he may even throw off the constraints of being bound to a specific computer and become free to roam the physical universe. How I wish I could be there with him.
