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Will You Ever Be Able To Upload Your Brain? (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader points out this piece in the Times by professor of neuroscience at Columbia and co-director of the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience Kenneth Miller, about what it would take to upload a human brain. "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. Unfortunately connectomics, while an important part of basic research, falls far short of the goal of reconstructing a mind, in two ways. First, we are far from constructing a connectome. The current best achievement was determining the connections in a tiny piece of brain tissue containing 1,700 synapses; the human brain has more than a hundred billion times that number of synapses. While progress is swift, no one has any realistic estimate of how long it will take to arrive at brain-size connectomes. (My wild guess: centuries.)"
The result is the same whether the brain is replaced a little at a time or all at once in a copy.
...or the copy, there's no way for them to tell
There's an old story about an axe that has it's handle replaced a few times. Eventually over the years it's used so much the head is replaced. And a few more handles after that. There was always a piece of the axe included when something was replaced. Is the current axe the same axe we started with? If not, at what point did it become a different axe?
As to whether an exact copy of you is actually you, I would say yes, unless you're going to argue something supernatural like a soul. It would be just the same as cloning a computer hard drive and placing it in identical hardware. From their perspective each computer is the original
You're probably thinking of a continuous point of view being the original, but human consciousness generally only exists in 16 hour spurts. When you sleep, is the 'you' that wakes up the same 'you' that went to sleep? There's certainly a gap in your consciousness which would be the same as being dead and coming back. Or the same as a copy waking up.
If the scale required is your only argument you have made a very common error regarding the speed of change in exponential processes.
What can we do now?
What is the rate of technology doubling, D?
How many times, X, do we need to do it to get to the required magnitude?
It will take D*X years where 2^X = one hundred billion
And that is without anything radically new being discovered in that time period, so 20 to 30 years is actually possible.
Imagine what a large scale 3D quantum computing array would be capable of. We have just seen silicon based quantum logic fabrication developed and we already have 3D silicon based memory arrays.