• HomeSweet home
  • Writingby David Eagleman
    • The Runaway SpeciesHow Human Creativity Remakes the World
    • Brain and BehaviorA Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective
    • The BrainThe Story of You
    • IncognitoThe Secret Lives of the Brain
    • SUMForty Tales from the Afterlives
    • Wednesday is Indigo BlueDiscovering the Brain of Synesthesia
    • Why the Net MattersHow the Internet Will Save Civilization
    • Other WritingEssays and articles
    • Scientific Publications
  • ResearchDavid's Neuroscience
    • Time perception
    • Synesthesia
    • Neurolaw
    • Deep brain recording
    • Sensory Substitution
    • Antiphospholipid Syndrome
    • Other projects
  • BlogLatest Ideas
  • ScheduleWhere to catch David
  • ContactReach Us

Silicon Immortality: Downloading Consciousness into Computers

Silicon Immortality: Downloading Consciousness into Computers

While medicine will advance in the next half century, we are not on a crash-course for achieving immortality by curing all disease.  Bodies simply wear down with use.  We are on a crash-course, however, with technologies that let us store unthinkable amounts of data and run gargantuan simulations.  Therefore, well before we understand how brains work, we will find ourselves able to digitally copy the brain's structure and able to download the conscious mind into a computer.

Silicon Immortality

If the computational hypothesis of brain function is correct, it suggests that an exact replica of your brain will hold your memories, will act and think and feel the way you do, and will experience your consciousness — irrespective of whether it's built out of biological cells, Tinkertoys, or zeros and ones.  The important part about brains, the theory goes, is not the structure, it is about the algorithms that ride on top of the structure.  So if the scaffolding that supports the algorithms is replicated — even in a different medium — then the resultant mind should be identical.  If this proves correct, it is almost certain we will soon have technologies that allow us to copy and download our brains and live forever in silica.  We will not have to die anymore.  We will instead live in virtual worlds like the Matrix.  I assume there will be markets for purchasing different kinds of afterlives, and sharing them with different people — this is future of social networking.  And once you are downloaded, you may even be able to watch the death of your outside, real-world body, in the manner that we would view an interesting movie.

Of course, this hypothesized future embeds many assumptions, the speciousness of any one of which could spill the house of cards.  The main problem is that we don't know exactly which variables are critical to capture in our hypothetical brain scan.  Presumably the important data will include the detailed connectivity of the hundreds of billions of neurons. But knowing the point-to-point circuit diagram of the brain may not be sufficient to specify its function.  The exact three-dimensional arrangement of the neurons and glia is likely to matter as well (for example, because of three-dimensional diffusion of extracellular signals).  We may further need to probe and record the strength of each of the trillions of synaptic connections.  In a still more challenging scenario, the states of individual proteins (phosphorylation states, exact spatial distribution, articulation with neighboring proteins, and so on) will need to be scanned and stored.  It should also be noted that a simulation of the central nervous system by itself may not be sufficient for a good simulation of experience: other aspects of the body may require inclusion, such as the endocrine system, which sends and receives signals from the brain.  These considerations potentially lead to billions of trillions of variables that need to be stored and emulated.

The other major technical hurdle is that the simulated brain must be able to modify itself. We need not only the pieces and parts, we also the physics of their ongoing interactions — for example, the activity of transcription factors that travel to the nucleus and cause gene expression, the dynamic changes in location and strength of the synapses, and so on. Unless your simulated experiences change the structure of your simulated brain, you will be unable to form new memories and will have no sense of the passage of time.  Under those circumstances, is there any point in immortality?


SiliconImmort3The good news is that computing power is blossoming sufficiently quickly that we are likely to make it within a half century.  And note that a simulation does not need to be run in real time in order for the simulated brain to believe it is operating in real time.  There's no doubt that whole brain emulation is an exceptionally challenging problem.  As of this moment, we have no neuroscience technologies geared toward ultra-high-resolution scanning of the sort required — and even if we did, it would take several of the world's most powerful computers to represent a few cubic millimeters of brain tissue in real time.  It's a large problem.  But assuming we haven't missed anything important in our theoretical frameworks, then we have the problem cornered and I expect to see the downloading of consciousness come to fruition in my lifetime.

(I originally published this essay in John Brockman's This Will Change Everything, a collection of answers to the Edge.org annual question)

  • Social sharing:
  • Add to Google Buzz
  • Add to Facebook
  • Add to Delicious
  • Digg this
  • Add to StumbleUpon
  • Add to Technorati
  • Add to Reddit
  • Add to MySpace
  • Like this? Tweet it to your followers!
Tagged under
  • Brain
  • Consciousness
  • Future

Related items

  • BrainCheck
  • The Neuroscience of Engagement
  • The science of de- and re-humanization
  • New Scientist time story
  • Documentary on the History Channel
More in this category: « Why I am a Possibilian The Brain and the Law »
back to top

Follow David on Instagram Follow David on Tumblr Follow David on Twitter Follow David on Facebook

From the Blog

  • Discovering amulets inside the mummy
    Discovering amulets inside the mummy

    I posted before about my scanning of a 3,000 year old mummy, Neskhons. Now, by analyzing the data in several different ranges of electron density, I've found something unexpected: inside the mummy's torso are 4 small funerary amulets.

  • New Scientist time story
    New Scientist time story

    New Scientist magazine featured my time perception research as their cover story. 

  • Powers of the Subconscious
    Powers of the Subconscious

    How significant is the subconscious?

  • Eagleman and Eno perform Sum
    Eagleman and Eno perform Sum

    Brian Eno and I have twice performed a musical version of Sum, once at the Sydney Opera House, and once at the Brighton Dome. Learn more.

In other news...

Emily Blunt reads for the Sum audio book

Hear the actress Emily Blunt (Young Victoria, Devil Wears Prada) read "The Cast" from Sum. She is one of the dozens of terrific actors who read for the audio book.

SUM is Book of the Year: Chicago Tribune

SUM was chosen as the best book of 2009 by Chicago Tribune's Pulitzer-winning literary critic Julia Keller.

Neurolaw: The Brain on Trial

Want to know how neuroscience will force major changes in our criminal justice system? Read David's article The Brain on Trial in The Atlantic. Now anthologized in 2012 Best American Science and Nature Writing.
atlantic072011

TheBrain
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
IndieBound
DVD
Incognito_Cover_Eagleman
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
IndieBound
International Editions
SumBestSeller
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
IndieBound
International Editions
Cover Cytowic Eagleman
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
IndieBound
NetMatters ebook
iPad app
eBook
DVD
CogNeuroTextbook
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
IndieBound
Runaway Species Hardcover

Amazon
IndieBound

Livewired Canongate sm
Coming 2020
CSS Valid | XHTML Valid | Top | + | - | reset | RTL | LTR
Copyright © Youretro 2019 All rights reserved. Custom Design by Youjoomla.com
YJSimpleGrid Joomla! Templates Framework official website
Blog