Sparks Brain Preservation
A Non-profit Organization
This page covers a variety of uploading scenarios. These topics are outside the comfort zone of most people, so they've been placed on their own page. If uploading does not excite you, remember that Biological Revival is still possible even if it might take a little longer. Future Technology covers the technology required for biological revival.
aka Whole Brain Emulation (WBE)
aka Mind Emulation
60 years
A human mind should also be able run on a different substrate such as silicon. This is called uploading. The main objections to mind uploading 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 emulation 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.
30 years
It should be possible to start with DNA and a personal history and build a brain emulation from that. Much of how you think is just genetic anyway. At some point, we should be able to create fairly decent emulations of people. This creates a path forward. A few early adopters could give their assets to their emulation when they die. The legal complications could be difficult, but it certainly seems possible through some sort of trust. Surprisingly, this might actually work because they could chemically fix their original brain and then harvest more information out of it later after technology improved. So any memory loss would only be temporary. This would allow full revival as well as continuity through an obviously rough time period. The legal system would gradually catch up with reality, and the full revived person would regain personhood. I suspect this will very rarely be used since the person doesn't really get revived until the full scan later anyway. But someone might still try it.
50 to 80 years, gradual
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. They both clearly need many more decades of improvements. As we develop microrobotics, such implants could be designed to cover large surfaces of the brain as well as branch out into small blood vessels. They could listen to the electrical activity of nearby neurons and also interact with them.
Our human brains only compute at about 10 bits per second and our long-term memory retention is about 1 bit per second. A little bit of augmentation could make a huge difference in speed and capacity. As soon as the very first harmless implant is developed, it's clear that it should become extremely popular. There should be decades of intensive development, with huge amounts of money being poured into making constant improvements. I will assume, for the sake of the scenario, that this revolution could begin in about 50 years and grow steadily after that. External input and output devices such as headsets, throat mics, and haptic gloves would be more mature by then, so healthy people who voluntarily opted to get BCIs would probably be doing it for some sort of augmentation that would not be possible with external hardware.
Many of our memories would be duplicated in external hardware because the memories would get gradually duplicated as we used the implants on a daily basis. Having our memories duplicated in hardware would be very useful because they would get retained permanently instead of fading. They would also be more accessible, better organized, and faster. We would also have lots of memories that would have been shared by loved ones or downloaded from others. It would get to the point where we would have far more memories in hardware than in our biological brains. The definition of memory in this context is extremely broad.
For BCIs to work, it's very likely that the software would try to emulate as much of the biological brain as possible in real time. This emulation would gradually get better. Even with an interface that was restricted to the brain surface and larger blood vessels, the emulation would be much more accurate than with a de novo emulation. As before, early adopters are likely to let the emulation take over legally when they die. They could also chemically fix their original brain and then harvest more information out of it later after technology improved. So any memory loss would only be temporary.
The BCI scenario is a way to approach mind uploading more gradually, both for individuals and for society. This ability to gradually transition makes it very exciting and useful. But I suspect it would 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.
60 years
This is the most likely scenario for a full resolution scan for upload. A brain could be scanned using electron microscopy, layer by layer. Microrobotics could divide a brain 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. This scanning would largely be a structural scan, yielding little chemical information, but that might be adequate as long as memory is not encoded in smaller structures than is currently believed.
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 are ongoing at OpenWorm, Drosophila Connectomics Group, Human Connectome Projects, Blue Brain Project, MICrONS, and more. Mouse brain mapping is already well underway. Progress in mapping the human connectome is expected to be exponential, just like it was for mapping the human genome. There is broad consensus that mapping an entire human brain is feasible. The first rough scan and upload could happen 20 years before it's perfected. This means that many brains could be preserved during this time period with the full expectation of revival in a few short years.
There would be huge advantages to uploading. Once uploaded, the mind could grow much more easily. Because of constant backups, it would be much more secure. Speed could be increased dramatically. Raw intelligence could grow without end. Once it's possible to upload, there would be huge pressure 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.
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 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.