Sep 17, 2024
Imagine a future where nobody dies instead our minds are uploaded to a digital world. They live in a real environment with avatar bodies and contribute to the biological world uploading has powerful appeal but what would it actually take to scan a person’s brain and upload their mind the main challenges are scanning a brain in detail to capture the mind and perfectly re-creating that detail artificially but first we have to know what to scan the human brain contains about 86 billion neurons connected by at least 100 trillion synopsis the patterof connectivity among the brain neurons that is all of the neurons and all their connections to each other is called the connect. We haven’t yet mapped the connect and there’s also a lot more to neural signal and there are hundreds possibly thousands of different kinds of connections or functions in a slightly different way, faster, slower, or shrink rapidly in the process of learning some more overtime and beyond the trillions of precise one to one connections between neurons some neurons also spray out neurotransmitters that affect other neurons at once all of these different kinds of interactions would need to be mapped in order to copy a person. So a lot of influences on neural signaling that are poorly understood or undiscovered to name just one example patterns of activity between neurons are likely influenced by a type of cell called surround neurons, and according to some scientists may even outnumber them by as many as 10 to one were once thought to be purely for structural support and their functions are still poorly understood but at least some of them can generate their own signals that influence information processing. Our understanding of the brain isn’t good enough to determine what we need to scan in order to replicate the mind, but assuming our knowledge does advance to that point, we scan it we can accurately scan a living human brain with resolutions of about half a millimeter using our best noninvasive scanning method MRI to detect Snap will need to scan at a resolution of about a micron 1000 of a millimeter to distinguish the kind of sin and precisely how strong each snap is will need even better resolution MRI depends on powerful magnetic field scanning at the resolution required to determine the details of individual would require a field strength, high enough to cook a person tissues so this kind of leap and resolution would require fundamentally new scanning technology. It would be more feasible to scan a dead brain using an electron microscope, but even that technology is nowhere near enough and requires killing the subject first Assuming we eventually understand the brain well enough to know what to scan and develop the technology to safely scan that resolution the next challenge would be to re-create that information digitally the main obstacles to doing so our computing power and storage space both of which are improving every year. We are actually much closer to attaining this technological capacity than we are to understanding or scanning our own minds Artificial neural networks already run our Internet search engines, digital assistance, self driving cars, Wall Street trading algorithms and smart phones nobody has yet built an artificial network with 86 billion neurons but technology improves. It may be possible to keep track of massive data set at every step in the scanning and uploading process. We’d have to be certain we were capturing all the necessary information accurately or there’s no telling what ruined version of a mind might emerge, uploading is theoretically possible like hundreds of years away from the technology and scientific understanding that would make it a reality and that reality would come with ethical and philosophical considerations who would have access to mind uploading what rights would be uploaded mines this be abused, we can eventually upload our minds. We should remains an open question, this lesson has an exciting idea about the biological basis for consciousness check out, rethinking consciousness for a fresh perspective on your perspective