Mind Uploading

Denition Mind uploading can be understood as the taking of a particular brain, scanning its structure in precise detail, and construction a software model that is authentic to the original that, when operated on the appropriate hardware, it will behave unerringly in the same way as the original brain.This process can also be known as whole brain emulation, mind transfer or electronic transcendence. Mind uploading or whole brain emulation (sometimes called mind transfer) is the hypothetical process of scanning and mapping a biological brain in detail and copying its state into a computer system or another computational device. The computer would have to run a simulation model so faithful to the original that it would behave in essentially the same way as the original brain, or for all practical purposes, indistinguishably. The simulated mind is assumed to be part of a virtual reality simulated world, supported by a simplied body simulation model. Alternatively, the simulated mind could be assumed to reside in a computer inside (or connected to) a humanoid robot or a biological body, replacing its brain. Theory & Philosophy Whole brain emulation is discussed as a logical endpoint of the topical computational neuroscience and neuroinformatics elds, both about brain simulation for medical research purposes. It is discussed in articial intelligence research publications as an approach to strong AI. Among futurists and within the transhumanist movement it is an important proposed life extension technology, originally suggested in biomedical literature in 1971. It is a central conceptual feature of numerous science ction novels and lms. Whole brain emulation is considered by some scientists as a theoretical and futuristic but possible technology, although mainstream research funders remain skeptical. Several contradictory and already passed attempts have been made during the years to predict when whole human brain emulation can be achieved. Substantial mainstream research and development are however being done in relevant areas including development of faster super computers, virtual reality, brain-computer interfaces, animal brain mapping and simulation, and information extraction from dynamically functioning brains. The question whether an emulated brain can be a human mind is debated by philosophers, and may be contradicted by the dualistic view of the human mind that is common in many religions.

Getting There
This section will discuss the progession of research, technology and techniques that will eventaully enable Minf Uploading. Current Research and Development The Swiss Federal Institute aims to simulate human brain activity. This research is called the Blue Brain Project. It will employ IBMs Blue Gene supercomputer design to determine the electric map of the human brain so that human cognition and mental disorders or disabilities can be studied. The research will work on small, less complicated sections of the brain and progress to the more complicated sections until the whole brain is mapped out. Of course, to actually simulate a human brain, scientists would need far more powerful computers than are available today. However, researchers remain optimistic that emerging technologies will make this possible within a few decades. Some of these emerging technologies for computers are quantum computers, DNA computers, carbon nanotube-based three-dimensional computers, and optical neural network based computers. Serial Sectioning has also been proposed as one of the means of mind uploading. In serial sectioning, the brain will be frozen and studied section by section using a laser or a diamond knife. The sections of the brain can then be studied using a transmission electron microscope. It can also be reconstructed in an articial brain. The articial brain would, however, also require higher computing power as well as storage capability than what is available today. Moreover, simply studying the brain slice by slice would fail to shed light on how it actually works or functions. The brain uses molecular events in its function and, unfortunately, an electron microscope cannot detect them. Due to this, the interaction between brain molecules, particularly at the synapse level, and similar microscopic events couldnt be studied. Nanotechnology could also prove successful in mapping out the brain. The brain will be infused with nanoparticles which will map out the brains physical structure and record chemical interactions. Nanobots could also replace damaged brain cells with articial ones, making way for a step by step or gradual transition to an articial brain. This method is similar to another proposal termed cyborging which will also map the brain and its functions and replace each component with an articial one. This is done systematically until the entire brain has been replaced by articial components. Relevant Technologies and Techniques The concepts behind the terms neural prosthetics, whole brain emulation and mind uploading are related, and in that order their objectives are of increasing complexity. A neural prosthetic is a replacement for or augmentation of a function or component of the nervous system in general, and of the human brain in particular. Currently, a number of neural prosthetics exist that replace or improve specic functions that are most commonly sensory functions. Examples are cochlear(1) and retinal(2) implants, but also implanted electrodes that inhibit seizures(3,4) and research toward the development of a prosthetic hippocampus(5). A neural prosthetic can be implemented as a hardware component, as software in

a general computing environment or as a mixture of both. Independent hardware components are ideal for medical purposes, while other forms are useful in neuroscientic research. In the long term, neural prosthetics that encompass all functions and components of the human brain may enable the emulation of complete human brain function on a different, possibly non-biological substrate. That condition is described by the term whole brain emulation. Emulation strives to equal the original function of an individual brain, while simulations in neuroscience research are attempts to create a constrained set of similar effects. The transition of the functions and components of a specic human brain to whole brain emulation in another substrate is described as mind uploading. The term uploading, commonly used in information science, implies an operation similar to the transfer of information from one computing system to another.

Potential Benets
This section will discuss the ways in which Mind Uploading has the potential to improve the human condition. Speed-up A computer-based intelligence such as an upload could potentially think much faster than a human even if it was no more intelligent. Human neurons exchange electrochemical signals with a maximum speed of about 150 meters per second, whereas the speed of light is about 300 million meters per second, about two million times faster. Also, neurons can generate a maximum of about 200 action potentials or spikes per second, whereas the number of signals per second in modern computer chips is about 2 GHz (about ten million times greater) and continually increasing. So even if the computer components responsible for simulating a brain were not signicantly smaller than a biological brain, and even if the temperature of these components was not signicantly lower, Eliezer Yudkowsky of the Singularity Institute for Articial Intelligence calculates that a simulated brain could run about 1 million times faster than a real brain, experiencing about a year of subjective time in only 31 seconds of real time. Immortality/Back-up In theory, if the information and processes of the mind can be disassociated from the biological body, they are no longer tied to the individual limits and lifespan of that body. Furthermore, information within a brain could be partly or wholly copied or transferred to one or more other substrates (including digital storage or another brain), thereby reducing or eliminating mortality risk. This general proposal appears to have been rst made in the biomedical literature in 1971 by renowned University of Washington biogerontologist George M. Martin. Multiple?Parallel Existences Another concept explored in science ction is the idea of more than one running copy of a human mind existing at once. Such copies could potentially allow an individual to experience many things at once, and later integrate the experiences of all copies into a

central mentality at some point in the future, effectively allowing a single sentient being to be many places at once and do many things at once; this concept has been explored in ction. Such partial and complete copies of a sentient being raise interesting questions regarding identity and individuality.

Issues
This section will address the ethical, legal and philosophical issues that this future technology engenders. Ethical Issues The ethical issues of uploading consciousness are difcult even to list. They would involve challenges to the ideas of body identity, human immortality, property rights, capitalism, human intelligence, an afterlife, and man as created in Gods image. Often, these challenges cannot be distinguished from those raised by all technologies that extend human technological control over human bodies, e.g. organ transplant. Perhaps the best way to explore such issues is to discover principles applicable to current bioethics problems, and ask what would be permissible if they were applied consistently to a future technology. This points back to the role of science ction in exploring such problems, as powerfully demonstrated in the 20th century by such works as Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Dune and Star Trek, each of which frame current ethical problems in a future environment where those have come to dominate the society. Legal and Economic Issues The only limited resources in a simulated world are computational resources, meaning simulation speed, and intellectual properties. In a simulated society, rich simulated minds may pay for faster simulation time than others. It may be difcult for authorities to supervise that human rights are not threatened in any computer in the world. It might for example be tempting for social science researchers to expose simulated minds, or whole isolated societies of simulated minds, to controlled experiments, where many copies of the same minds, or repeated reruns of the same simulation, are exposed to different test conditions. Philosophical Issues Another philosophical issue with mind uploading is whether an uploaded mind is really the same sentience, or simply an exact copy with the same memories and personality; or, indeed, what the difference could be between such a copy and the original (see the Swampman thought experiment). This issue is especially complex if the original remains essentially unchanged by the procedure, thereby resulting in an obvious copy which could potentially have rights separate from the unaltered, obvious original. Most projected brain scanning technologies, such as serial sectioning of the brain, would necessarily be destructive, and the original brain would not survive the brain scanning procedure. But if it can be kept intact, the computer-based consciousness could be a copy of the still-living biological person. It is in that case implicit that copying a consciousness could be as feasible as literally moving it into one or several copies, since these technologies generally

involve simulation of a human brain in a computer of some sort, and digital les such as computer programs can be copied precisely. It is usually assumed that once the versions are exposed to different sensory inputs, their experiences would begin to diverge, but all their memories up until the moment of the copying would remain the same. The problem is made even more serious by the possibility of creating a potentially innite number of initially identical copies of the original person, which would of course all exist simultaneously as distinct beings. The most parsimonious view of this phenomenon is that the two (or more) minds would share memories of their past but from the point of duplication would simply be distinct minds (although this is complicated by merging). Many complex variations are possible. Depending on computational capacity, the simulation may run at slower or faster simulation time as compared to the elapsed physical time, resulting in that the simulated mind would perceive that the physical world is running in slow motion or fast motion respectively, while biological persons will see the simulated mind in fast or slow motion respectively. A brain simulation can be started, paused, backed-up and rerun from a saved backup state at any time. The simulated mind would in the latter case forget everything that has happened after the instant