Sparks Brain Preservation
A Non-profit Organization
Whole Brain Emulation (WBE), also known as mind uploading, is mainstream science that is being pursued by many groups around the world, including OpenWorm, Drosophila Connectomics Group, Human Connectome Projects, Blue Brain Project, MICrONS, and more. Eventually, after decades of progress with simpler animals, many scientists expect to make more progress with human WBE. If WBE does not excite you, remember that Biological Revival is still possible even though it will take much longer. Future Repair Technology covers the technology required for biological repair.
The first successful human WBE is roughly 50 years in the future. A human mind should be able run on a different substrate such as silicon. The main objections to WBE tend to be philosophical, with some people feeling that this would be a cheap copy and not really "them". This leads to long debates about "identity" and "self". This angst exists simply because it's hard to envision software so complex; we have no daily experience with that sort of technology. But these objections are just a form of vitalism, a belief that there is something fundamentally special about the brain that could not be replicated by some other computational machine. If accurate WBE technology is ever developed, the philosophical objections will quickly wither in favor of pragmatism.
If you preserve memories and then duplicate them on other hardware, it's much more than just recorded events from your past. When we talk about memories, we're talking about memories that are episodic, semantic, implicit, emotional, procedural, perceptual, habitual, motivational, interpretive, heuristic, cognitive, somatic, reflexive, social, cultural, identity, contextual, and many other kinds.
This technology should be much easier to develop than any physical repair technology. It is, therefore, the most plausible revival scenario by far.
This is already possible and will gradually improve. This does not qualify as WBE because it does not use the same internal computations to arrive at the external behavior. Instead, the external behavior is mimicked in some manner. Simulations could get extremely complex and convincing, even including the ability to learn, but the only way to create a WBE would be to obtain the connectome using some sort of scanning technology.
There are a few people who propose that external data collected during a person's life could be used to bring them back to life. No. This would only be a simulation because the internal computations are different from the original.
The purpose of BCIs is to listen to the electrical activity of nearby neurons and also interact with them. It seems like a good idea, but BCIs are currently very crude and it's unclear how long it would take for them to become more elegant and generally useful, if at all. Current technology includes Neuralink mounted on the brain surface and Stentrode mounted inside a large blood vessel. There is also some early work in microscopic distributed devices. The BCI scenario could be a way to approach WBE more gradually, both for individuals and for society. But, unfortunately, it will probably be cut short when microscope scanning, described below, becomes available. At that point, further BCI development becomes irrelevant because the potential customers would all have uploaded already.
This is the most likely scenario for a full resolution scan for WBE and should be available in about 50 years. A brain could be scanned using electron microscopy, layer by layer. A brain could robotically be divided into 1.3 million 1mm cubes. Each cube could be serially imaged with electron microscope technology that already exists today. This would result in 43 billion images that AI would need to reassemble and trace. Newer techniques such as expansion microscopy could also yield chemical information in addition to structural.
A fruit fly brain with 139,000 neurons and over 50,000,000 synapses has already been fully mapped after 10 years of work. Researchers fully map neural connections of the fruit fly brain. Other mapping projects for other animals and humans are ongoing. Full mouse brain mapping is already underway. Progress in mapping the human connectome is expected to be exponential, just like it was for mapping the human genome. There is reasonable consensus that mapping an entire human brain is feasible.
There would be many advantages to WBE as compared to a living brain. Once a mind was running on a better substrate, it could grow constantly in size and speed. It would not be easy or cheap, but it would be possible gradually. Because of constant backups, a mind would be much more secure. Once it's possible to upload, there would be huge incentives for everyone to do so, and this should result in something like a Great Upload Event, where the entire human species uploads over a fairly short period of time. This event is likely to happen long before any sort of nanotechnology, meaning that we will all be able to take part in that revolution instead of being left behind by AI.
A likely scenario is that the Great Upload Event could start in about 50 years, or 2075. At this point, at least one somewhat successful human upload would have been performed and it would be quickly becoming clear to the general public that uploading would be feasible soon. There is always a lag between proof of concept and general availability, and we could assume that this lag might be about 20 years. During the following 20 years of intensive progress, there would be many brain preservations with the full expectation of revival in a few short years after the technology had matured. This would become a period of intense social change, as people finally recognized the clear scientific path to immortality.
After uploading, it should become common to make duplicate minds for various reasons. Duplicates would be created for revivals, backups, transportation, multitasking, etc. An original and a full duplicate would both be the same mind at the time of duplication and would only diverge gradually. A partial duplicate could be useful for multitasking where a subset of the mind would be adequate for a given task. This would be especially important as minds get much larger and more complex. A person could have hundreds of partial duplicates performing simple tasks for them before being reintegrated.
Resistance to the idea of a duplicate is yet another example of vitalism, believing that there is a "life force" distinct from physical laws. Many people currently have trouble with this, but if it becomes possible, duplicates would simply become a non-issue that we would all happily go along with. It would be so useful and so enriching that your angst would quickly fall away. Those few who choose not to use duplicates would quickly fall behind like the Amish.
Most people would be likely to gather and integrate a vast number of memories from loved ones or download them from others. Just as we now watch TV shows and movies because we are curious and don't want to miss out, we would do the same with memories. For example, a skilled pianist could share only their procedural memories for piano playing, allowing someone else to immediately know how to play the piano.
Memories and duplicate minds would actually exist on a continuum and we don't currently have vocabulary to describe them well. A duplicate would generally refer to a much larger set of memories that would be intended to become conscious. Memories, by contrast, would be much smaller and intended to be integrated into another person.
Two minds could be merged. This would obviously be much easier and much more common if the two minds had recently forked from a common mind. This would be the end result of multitasking, for example. But there would also be the possibility of merging two completely different minds that had never shared a common origin. That scenario is hard for us to currently imagine. It also might be fairly uncommon, but it certainly seems like it would be possible, so someone would do it. It would probably involve a lot of legal work to combine all the assets and legal statuses of both individuals into one new individual.
Two minds could also be merged even if they were not of equal complexity. For example, a human mind could be merged with a pet dog, a whale, or literally any other animal. It is likely that some humans will choose to merge with a wide variety of animals to expand their view and understanding of the world. A severely damaged human could also be merged with a healthy human. For example, if a preserved brain was in poor condition, and only something like 20% of the mind remained, it might not make much sense to try to revive that individual in the traditional sense. Perhaps reviving them by merging with a loved one would make more sense.