Artificial Intelligence, Mind & the Future
Mind Uploading (Whole Brain Emulation)
Proposes that a mind could in principle be preserved and continued outside its original brain by scanning its full computational structure and running an equally detailed simulation on a different substrate.
Proponents
Hans Moravec, Ray Kurzweil, Nick Bostrom
Evidence For
A proof-of-concept already exists at a tiny scale: the OpenWorm project has simulated the complete 302-neuron connectome of a roundworm closely enough to control a simple robot body, suggesting the barrier to human-scale emulation is one of scale and resolution, not principle.
Evidence Against
The human brain has roughly 86 billion neurons and around 100 trillion synapses; mapping and simulating a system at that scale — including whatever fine-grained biochemical detail turns out to matter for a mind rather than just a network diagram — remains an enormous, unsolved engineering gap between the proof-of-concept and the goal.
Real Sources
Transmissions
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