Will You Ever Be Able to Upload Your Brain?

Miller, Kenneth D. "Will You Ever Be Able to Upload Your Brain?" Sunday Review, Opinion section, The New York Times 10 October 2015.

Short answer to the title question: possibly, but for the foreseeable future, uploading a mind into a computer, android robot, bio-engineered brain, or other entity will be colloquial 'science fiction'.

A theoretical neuroscientist notes that he studies "models of brain circuits, precisely the sort of models that would be needed to try to reconstruct or emulate a functioning brain from a detailed knowledge of its structure." He does not "in principle see any reason that what I’ve described could not someday, in the very far future, be achieved (though it’s an active field of philosophical debate). But to accomplish" such immortality through brain/mind emulation, "these future scientists would need to know details of staggering complexity about the brain’s structure, details quite likely far beyond what any method today could preserve in a dead brain." The essay usefully asks the question, "How much would we need to know to reconstruct a functioning brain?" and — after a very quick Cliff's Notes review of basic brain vocabulary — begins to answer the question with the assertion that "Much of the current hope of reconstructing a functioning brain rests on connectomics: the ambition to construct a complete wiring diagram, or 'connectome,' of all the synaptic connections between neurons in the mammalian brain." That, of course, is a daunting task, but more important is that "even if this goal were achieved, it would be only a first step toward the goal of describing the brain sufficiently to capture a mind, which would mean understanding the brain’s detailed electrical activity." Hence, absent a major breakthrough, SF writers using the uploaded mind motif will need to deal with a kind of Cartesian mystic entity or similar narrative gimmick.

RDE 27Oct15, RDE, Title, 28Aug19