Uploading consciousness into a computer is one of the likely paths to human immortality. But how to scan the mind and are we really ready for it? Says American scientist Michael Graziano
Michael Graziano is professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton University. He studies the neurobiological foundations of consciousness and the functioning of the brain.
Imagine a future in which no one dies – on the contrary, the consciousness of a person is uploaded into the digital world. There, it can exist in an avatar body in a plausible artificial reality, and even return, influencing the biological world.
The potential for mind uploading is enormous, but what would it take to scan the brain and transfer its consciousness?
The main difficulty lies in scanning the brain with a degree of detail sufficient to capture consciousness and its subsequent most accurate recreation. But first you need to determine what exactly to scan.
The human brain consists of approximately 86 billion neurons connected to each other through at least 100 trillion synapses. This model of connecting brain neurons, or rather, the combination of all neurons and their interconnections, is called the human connectome. The map of connectome connections has not yet been compiled, and the mechanism of signal transmission between neurons is not fully understood.
There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of different kinds of connections or synapses. Each of them functions in its own way. Some work faster, others slower. Some grow or shrink rapidly in the learning process, while others are more stable over time. And in addition to trillions of well-defined direct pairings, there are neurons that emit neurotransmitters that affect many other neurons simultaneously. To copy human consciousness, it is necessary to create a map of various types of interactions.
There are also many factors that affect neural signals, but they are still little studied or not found at all. Let’s take just one example.
The patterns of activity between neurons are most likely influenced by a type of cell called glia. Glia surround neurons and, according to some scientists, there are ten times more such cells than neurons. It used to be thought that glial cells are only structural support, but although their functions are still poorly understood, some of them can certainly generate their own signals that affect the process of information transfer.
How to scan the brain?
The existing concept of the brain is not enough yet to determine what is actually needed to copy consciousness, but imagine that knowledge has reached the required level, how then to scan the brain?
Today, using advanced non-invasive techniques such as MRI, it is possible to obtain clear scanned images of a living human brain with a resolution of about half a millimeter.
Detecting synapses would require a scan with a resolution of about a micron – a thousandth of a millimeter. Determining the type of synapse, and exactly how active each one is, would require even higher resolution.
MRI uses strong magnetic fields. Scanning at the resolution needed to recognize the details of individual synapses would require a field so strong that the brain tissue would simply be welded together. Therefore, in order to make a breakthrough in the quality of image resolution, a fundamentally new scanning technology is needed.
It is much easier to scan a dead brain with an electron microscope, but this technology is also useless, since it would be necessary to first kill the object of study.
How to digitize the brain
Let’s say we get to know the brain well enough and understand what to scan, and also invent high-resolution, safe scanning technology, but then the problem of reproducing digital data immediately arises. The main barriers will be computing power and data storage, although both of these parameters are improving every year.
In fact, we are far more advanced in terms of computers than we are in scientific understanding and mind scanning. Artificial neural networks are already driving web search engines, visual assistants, self-driving cars, algorithmic trading on Wall Street, and smartphones. No one has yet managed to build an artificial network of 86 billion neurons, but if computer technology continues to improve, it will be possible to manage even such volumes of data.
At each stage of the scanning and downloading process, one must make sure that the necessary information is collected accurately, otherwise one can inadvertently receive a corrupted version of consciousness.
While mind-uploading is theoretically possible, it will likely take hundreds more years to develop the technology and scientific understanding to actually implement it. And all this will run into problems of an ethical and philosophical nature.: who will be able to download consciousness into the virtual world? What rights will the virtual consciousness have? What are the possible abuses of this technology?
And even if someday the uploading of consciousness becomes possible, whether it is possible to do this – the question is still open …