Mind Uploading

Definition

Mind Uploading is a speculative process by which a brain would be completely copied and stored on a computer. The ramifications of this type of technology would be enormous: people could save back-up copies of themselves, live forever, "completely understand" a person, resurrect frozen minds, etc. The theory behind this technology is that our brain can be reduced to information patterns. With sufficiently complex computers and sensors we could copy these information patterns and re-substantiate them on hard drives. The main advocates of this technology tend to support cryogenics as well. The question of the feasibility of this technology raises important questions regarding the nature of humanity, consciousness, embodiment, and identity.

Premise

If what makes a mind is the organization of the system rather than the material it is built from, then the same organization implemented in another substrate would be the same mind. Neurons are treated as components whose behavior is describable, and the brain as a network whose state and dynamics could in principle be recorded.

The strong form of the claim requires that every functionally relevant property of the brain is capturable at some finite level of description. The weak form requires only that enough be captured to produce a system whose behavior is indistinguishable from the original, which is a lower bar and a different claim.

Proposed methods

Destructive scanning. The brain is fixed, sectioned, and imaged at a resolution sufficient to trace every connection, then discarded. This is the approach most connectomics work actually uses, and it is what makes the procedure terminal for the subject.

Gradual replacement. Neurons are replaced one at a time with functionally equivalent artificial units, on the argument that continuity of experience is preserved if no single substitution is noticed. Hans Moravec proposed this version in Mind Children (1988). It is designed specifically to sidestep the copy problem below, and whether it succeeds in doing so is disputed.

Whole brain emulation. Anders Sandberg and Nick Bostrom's 2008 technical report for the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford set out the requirements as an engineering problem: scanning resolution, translation to a computational model, and simulation hardware, with estimates at each of eleven levels of description from computational modules down to quantum effects. The report's contribution is the decomposition, not a claim that the thing is near.

Progress

The complete connectome of Caenorhabditis elegans, a nematode with 302 neurons, was published by John White and colleagues in 1986. The OpenWorm project has been attempting to simulate that organism since 2011 and has not produced a working behavioral model.

The adult Drosophila brain connectome, roughly 140,000 neurons, was published by the FlyWire consortium in 2024.

The human brain contains approximately 86 billion neurons, a figure established by Suzana Herculano-Houzel's isotropic fractionator method in 2009, revising the long-cited 100 billion. Synapses are estimated at 100 trillion or more. A collaboration between Harvard and Google published H01 in 2021, a reconstruction of roughly one cubic millimetre of human temporal cortex, containing about 57,000 cells and 150 million synapses, occupying 1.4 petabytes of data. The whole brain is on the order of one million times that volume.

The gap is not only storage. A connectome records connections, and the behavior of a synapse depends on receptor types, neuromodulator concentrations, glial activity, and gene expression, none of which structural imaging captures.

Objections

The copy problem. If the scan is non-destructive and the original survives, there are two entities and the original has not gone anywhere. This shows that the procedure produces a copy rather than a transfer. Destroying the original in the process does not change what happened, it removes the witness. Derek Parfit's work on personal identity, particularly Reasons and Persons (1984), sets out the branching cases in detail and concludes that identity is not what matters, a conclusion most people find harder to accept than to follow.

Embodiment. N. Katherine Hayles argues in How We Became Posthuman that the separation of information from its material substrate is a historical construction traceable to the Macy Conferences, not a discovered fact, and that cognition does not survive the abstraction. Hubert Dreyfus, Francisco Varela, and Andy Clark make versions of the same objection from different directions: that a mind is constituted in part by a body acting in an environment, so an emulation without one is not the same system running elsewhere.

Substrate. John Searle's Chinese Room argument holds that syntactic manipulation does not produce semantics, and therefore that a simulation of a mind is a description rather than an instance. Roger Penrose argues from a different position that consciousness involves non-computable physical processes.

Simulation versus instantiation. A simulation of a rainstorm does not make anything wet. Whether minds fall on the rainstorm side or the calculator side of this distinction is the question, and it is not settled by any amount of engineering progress.

Advocates and institutions

Hans Moravec, Mind Children (1988), and Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999) and The Singularity Is Near (2005), are the two most cited advocates. Randal Koene founded Carboncopies to coordinate work on substrate-independent minds. Ken Hayworth founded the Brain Preservation Foundation, which awarded prizes for demonstrated preservation of connectome-scale structure in whole brains.

Robin Hanson's The Age of Em (2016) takes a different approach, assuming emulation works and reasoning out the resulting economy, in which copies are cheap, labor supply is unbounded, and subjective time runs at whatever speed is purchased.

Cryonics organizations, chiefly Alcor and the Cryonics Institute, are connected to this literature through a shared premise: that preservation now buys optionality on a future procedure.

In fiction

The wiki's fiction entries treat uploading largely as a problem rather than a solution. See Consciousness Slum for the failure case, Artificial Heaven, and Mona Lisa Overdrive, where the Aleph holds constructs of the dead and the novel declines to say what they are.

Related Reading

• Consciousness Slum
• Artificial Heaven
• How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics
• My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts
• Mindware: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Cognitive Science
• Android Epistemology
• The Allure of Machinic Life: Cybernetics, Artificial Life, and the New AI
• Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media
• The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future
• The Cyborg's Dilemma - Progressive Embodiment in Virtual Environments
• The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society
• Feedback and Cybernetics: Reimaging the Body in the Age of the Cyborg
• Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox...How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean
• Mona Lisa Overdrive
• Neuromancer
• The Cyborg Handbook

Key texts

• Moravec, Hans. Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence. Harvard University Press, 1988.
• Sandberg, Anders, and Nick Bostrom. Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap. Technical Report 2008-3, Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University, 2008.
• Parfit, Derek. Reasons and Persons. Oxford University Press, 1984.
• Hanson, Robin. The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth. Oxford University Press, 2016.
• Searle, John. "Minds, Brains, and Programs." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3, no. 3 (1980): 417-457.
• White, J.G., E. Southgate, J.N. Thomson, and S. Brenner. "The Structure of the Nervous System of the Nematode Caenorhabditis elegans." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 314 (1986): 1-340.