It's a common sci-fi theme in some far-flung future, us, humans have the ability to plugin our brains upload our minds and carry on about our business,  as if nothing had ever happened, and let's face it back up our brains to the cloud does have some advantages, having a digital copy of your consciousness means that it could be backed up and stored indefinitely, effectively making you immortal and you could pour your mind into any other vessel, another human, an alien avatar, a robot, or even a global computer network. Divorcing the brain from the biological body would truly allow humans to transcend, but let's get back to reality for a second is backing up our brains actually a thing that we can do? Is it even something that we should be trying to do?

Well remarkably even though it's one of the more out of their futures for Humanity, it's probably the one with the most promise with mainstream research and mega investment laying the groundwork right now. Because in order to get our consciousness into the cloud, we first need to understand exactly what consciousness is, and doing that is the goal not only for hopeful transcendence but the neuroscientists and psychologists everywhere.

Even starting small to simply back up all the information in our brains are no mean feat. Our knowledge basically consists of what we can remember and our memories don't have a neat filing system like a library or even a computer.

In fact, our memories only really exist when we actively recall them since the act of remembering certain facts strengthens certain pathways in the brain while others rarely used are lost.
So, to just take the information that our brain contains we have to take the whole conscious thinking part as well and although that really does sound like science fiction it might actually be more straightforward than you think. Many scientists believe that our consciousness, our thoughts, dreams, internal monologues, and everything that makes us, us is simply a natural result of all the information processing that goes on in the immense neural network of our brains.

So, to be able to store and run the information and consciousness from a biological brain, you just need to make a digital copy of the entire brain network, no biggie.

It starts with making a map of the brain and I'm not talking about one of those called color-coded maps of prefrontal cortexes and temporal lobes, this map has to show everything it has to show all 100 billion neurons and the quadrillion connections between them,  and it doesn't stop at the brain either to capture all the inputs and outputs we'd need to incorporate the connections to the spinal cord,7 sensory receptors all over the body and muscle cells too and how do you get a picture of all the brain's connections, well you slice it up, of course, it's likely that the only way we'll be able to create such a detailed map is by taking paper-thin slices and scanning them one at a time.

And yet, because we don't know exactly what causes our consciousness this still might not be enough, zooming into each neuron we might also have to map out the positions and types of individual molecules as they move around which is a whole other level of complicated, but it might not be impossible in 2010 scientists imaged a small section of mouse brain in the finest scale details ever achieved of any mammal with more than 300,000 times the resolution of a normal MRI scan, and you can even help to  emulate the workings of a fruit fly's brain on your home computer but when it comes to capturing all the information contained in the human mind you need a mammoth amount of computing power, even at the lowest feasible resolution a map of the brains wiring would need a supercomputer that's a trillion time more powerful then your home computer and with 10,000 terabytes of data storage again that sounds impossible but computer power is increasing all the time,  doubling roughly every 18 months according to Moore's law.

That means that a supercomputer capable of emulating a human brain could be available by 2044 that's just 27 years away, how that mind could function and communicate well that's a bridge to be crossed when we get there.

So, whole-brain emulation may indeed be achievable in our lifetimes but is it something we'll be looking forward to as much as the next smartphone. Well maybe, maybe even more so, if we do get there it would probably mean that we've reached a stage whereby we can control all the inputs and outputs of our digital brains neural network meaning that we could upload new information whilst downloading data for other users to share and if when you were alive you were poor at maths or you could never quite get your head around the ending of Inception well no problem just purchase another upgrade, death might actually become something to look forward to a gateway to new information and understanding that you couldn't achieve whilst locked in your fragile human body and life as we know it may become the most tedious part of living.

Your simulation wouldn't even need to run in real-time running the brains neural network at higher speeds could lead to new levels of intelligence and problem solving yet unsurprisingly giving your mind over to the Machine has some pretty intense ethical and legal implications, firstly thanks to the slicing scanning method of brain mapping it's not the sort of thing you can dabble in while you're alive and in the early days of mind uploading there's no guarantee we'll always get it right what would it be like to wake up after your death in a digital emulation that didn't work quite right broken emulations could cause more than just the blue screen of death but major suffering or uploaded consciousness, even if it all worked perfectly the transcendent mind could be at risk from the malicious like deadly computer viruses or even something as simple and mundane as a power cut.

And should be emulated brains be considered people and be given the rights the same as biological humans and who owes the hardware and software that they run on and with their brain, in the cloud, they're at risk of their mental code being hacked and exposed how can we ensure the privacy of our innermost thought,

So, yes, backing up our brains isn't going to be straightforward in any sense but maybe in the next thirty years or so we'll figure out the answers.

But for now, I'm personally happy to stick with my squishy biological brain, but how about you would you be happy to be reduced to a whole load of ones and zeros what would you do if you transcended your bodily existence.

 

 

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