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.)"

Comments

Locality of self.

[tlambert]

Locality of self.

The problem with almost all "uploading" schemes is that it creates a copy of your brain structure, so it's a copy of you, rather than you. Externally, there might be no apparent difference to an outside observer, but internally, you're kind of dead, if that 1 cubic foot of meat space is no longer functional.

The only hope of an upload of the actual "you" would be an incremental replacement of brain structure, such that you lived in both meat-you and electronic-you at the same time, until the electronic-you completely replaced the meat-you, without a loss of continuity of consciousness.

Otherwise, you're just building pod people. Which could be useful, if you wanted to embed one of them in a starship (or more likely, a tank or other weapon of war), or if you wanted to make a lot of duplicate copies of a particular mind, and didn't care about their locality of self, either.

Re:Locality of self.

[jeepies]

The result is the same whether the brain is replaced a little at a time or all at once in a copy.

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 ...or the copy, there's no way for them to tell

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.

Re:Very Probably Wrong

[ranton]

The estimate that it will take centuries is probably what is the farthest off.

Indeed. It's certain to take much longer.

Its almost silly to think any advancement will take centuries based on the exponential nature of scientific discoveries. The only discoveries that are centuries away are ones we cannot even fathom today. Comparing today's technology to 2115 technology is not like comparing today's technology to 1915 tech. It is like comparing today's technology to bronze age tech. In a hundred years our current technology will seem as primitive as the first metalworking tools.

Honestly, these scientists may be correct that the method they are using to model the human brain will take centuries to develop. In truth their specific method will probably never work at the scale of the entire human brain. Instead the future technique to accomplish this will make the task seem trivial at its inception.

Another likely possibility is that we advance our knowledge of the brain far enough to improve upon it long before we can recreate it. Similar to how we don't have flying cars yet because there simply isn't a good enough reason to have them, we may never model the human brain digitally because we find such as exercise to be pointless. We may create a far better way to extend consciousness beyond our current physical limitations.

When you try to predict what will happen in 100 years at our current progress, the only silly opinion to have is that there are any limits at all to what could happen.

Double every 4 years and it will take less than 50

[dsmatthews9379]

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.