Can You Upload Your Mind & Live Forever?
The desire to be free from the limits of the human experience is as old as our first stories. We exist in an endless universe, only bound by the laws of physics, and yet our consciousness is trapped in mortal machines made of meat. With the breathtaking explosion of innovation and progress, for the first time, the concept of leaving our flesh piles behind and uploading our minds into a digital utopia seems possible, even like the logical next step on our evolutionary ladder.
Upload what exactly? Mind is one of those words that are really hard to define. It's thought to be the collective abilities of your consciousness and intelligence, the thing that lets you imagine, recognize, and dream. Mind uploading is the hypothetical concept of making a copy of this inner world and transferring it into a computer to run a simulation of your consciousness. But even defining the premise gets really hard, really fast.
The possibility of mind uploading is based on three assumptions.
Assumption one: Your mind is in your brain's structure, arrangement, and biochemistry. The idea that everything about the mind can be found in the brain is called physicalism, and it keeps our discussion within the domain of natural law.
Assumption two: At some point, we will understand the brain well enough and possess the technology to simulate all of its aspects to make a digital mind copy.
Assumption three: Computer software can host your mind, which means the mind is computable. There is no physical property in the brain, including consciousness, that cannot be simulated accurately, even if it requires a lot of code.
All of these assumptions have been proposed and challenged by scientists and philosophers, and they remain the subject of passionate debate. With so many fundamental questions still unanswered, it's hard to discuss the topic without annoying someone. Whatever your position, every discussion of mind upload has to begin with the brain.
The brain, in a nutshell, is the most complex biological structure known and deserves its own entire video. So let's just take a brief look at it. Around 100 billion neurons are communicating via 1 million billion connections that are sending signals up to 1,000 times each second, which is one quadrillion events every second of your waking life. And it's not just neurons; there are billions of supporting and immune cells of various types performing different jobs.
On a macro level, the brain can be divided into two sections with different roles, from breathing and heart rate to coordinating movement and involuntary reflexes. The most developed parts, the neocortex or the outermost layer of the brain, hold memories, our ability to plan, think, and imagine, hope and dream. Where exactly the "you" part of the brain is situated is not entirely clear. We know that areas like the precuneus cortex have the greatest influence on our consciousness, but also that several areas can network together to share tasks; none of them can do alone.
The brain's building blocks are not exactly simple either. Neurons are not just wires; they alter and process information. Synapses, where signals are handed over from one neuron to the next, contain receptors for hundreds of chemical signals, opening them up to outside influence. We have a basic understanding of how these work, and we can accurately predict their behavior at small scales, but there's a lot more to the brain than just nerve signals. Hormones play a huge role, like serotonin, which affects our mood, or histamine, which helps us learn. The brain is influenced by our other parts too, from heart nerves to gut bacteria.
What seemed like a very complicated system to begin with gets even more complicated the more we learn about it. To get this wildly interconnected mess of cells, meat, and chemicals into a computer, we need a model that we can simulate in our digital world—some sort of scan. Unfortunately, our scanning technology, like fMRI machines, is not nearly good enough to attempt such a thing.
But there is a different method that seems very promising: cutting a brain into tiny slices and scanning them with a high-resolution electron microscope to create an accurate map of all the cells and connections. In 2019, scientists successfully mapped a cubic millimeter of mouse brain, roughly the size of a big grain of sand. It contained 100,000 neurons with a billion synapses and 4 km of nerve fibers. This grain of brain was cut into 25,000 slices. Five electron microscopes ran continuously for 5 months, collecting more than 100 million images. It took 3 months to assemble the images into a 3D model. The completed data set fills up 2 million GB of cloud storage.
To scan a whole human brain, we would have to repeat this effort a million times, which is much easier said than done. Even worse, to correctly simulate a brain, we might even have to map out much smaller building blocks to include the billions of underlying proteins or even individual molecules that cause all the behaviors we see at the cellular level, which might produce more data than the capacity of all data storage on Earth.
Brain: water to consciousness; wine. While all of these issues are annoying, the real question is: how do we turn the static blueprint of the brain into an active thing? Even if we have a scan down to the level of synapses, we need laws and rules that animate the wiring diagram to endow this static structure with life. We need to update it with the various laws of chemical binding and electrodynamics to animate the simulation so it becomes a dynamic, active thing like a brain that exists from one microsecond to the next, that can evolve in time, think, see, and act.
The reality is that we just don't know if this is possible to achieve, if our technology can give rise to real minds. It all hinges on the nature of the problem: Are the brain and mind just complicated and a lot of work to figure out, or are they complex in a way that we can't solve?
In the worst case, consciousness is more than the sum of the parts of the brain in a way that we don't realize yet—complex in a way that we can't solve by getting better scans. Just having a list of the ingredients might not be enough to get a good consciousness cake. Right now, we have a great starting point with tangible scientific results and an end goal, but the road to true simulation is unclear and requires a lot of innovation and research.
Humans have historically been horrible at predicting the pace of progress. In the best case, it's just a matter of doing the work and finding the right solutions. It might not be necessary to simulate every last cell down to the last atom; instead, it may be possible to simplify elements into probabilistic models that could match the behavior of the brain using a more manageable number of simpler systems.
So, we really don't know if we will ever understand our brain and consciousness well enough to upload human minds. But the science is real and worth pursuing. At the very least, we will just learn a lot about ourselves and develop a bunch of new technologies. If we succeed, this might put mind uploading well within the capabilities of our rapidly progressing computer technology. The consequences for humanity and our future in this universe are vast, creepy, and amazing.
The copy of successful mind uploading is functional immortality. Unless damaged or deleted, you will continue to exist as long as a copy is stored somewhere. Of course, if the scan is corrupted in any of a myriad of ways, your mind might get corrupted too. You might be in an eternity of pain or paranoia or having an endless psychotic breakdown. The question of whether this digital mind is you opens another whole can of worms. For now, we'll just assume that your digital mind at least feels like it's you.
How would mind uploading change your outlook on life? Will you feel safer knowing that death is not necessarily the end, or would you try to be super safe to avoid dying before your mind is uploaded? If scanning technology does become advanced enough, your biological and digital versions could coexist; you could help each other out by making your biological lifespan more enjoyable and the future of the copy more secure.
Whatever happens, your mind copy will begin a completely new life once it opens its digital eyes for the first time. Having a functional body is actually quite nice, and you're pretty used to it. Food, love, pain, and exhaustion—all of these things are parts of us that we must live with. But in the end, they are the result of neurons firing in your brain. So while you could decide to live in a simulated body, it might be optional for a digital mind.
Falling in love might lose meaning if you can have it at the press of a button. Instead, you might end up searching for new extraordinary experiences: walk on the surface of the Sun, speed up time to skip past a few boring months, or experience a simulation of the past. Your perspectives and priorities will change as you continue to exist in this liberated form.
The longer digital minds exist, eventually they will likely gain greater knowledge of themselves and an ability to change their own contents. This can be as simple as deleting a memory that bugs you. You might change aspects of your personality, like grudges, addictions, or laziness. Without the constraints of biology, your abilities might improve as technology progresses, while your priorities or goals might become more and more foreign to your original brain if it's still alive.
Waking up to the true potential of digital immortality will be gradual. You can start projects that would take more than a lifetime to complete. Scientists could accumulate an incredible amount of knowledge, leading to discoveries that could revolutionize the world. Adventurers could upload themselves onto small spaceships and embark on journeys to the stars, just putting themselves on pause for thousands of years at a time.
Although it's unlikely that every digital mind will work for the benefit of humanity, since our current meat versions don't do that either, some will seek power and influence and will have a literal eternity of trying to create empires. Others will begin hoarding as many resources for themselves as possible as they compete with other minds trying to do the same. The longer they live, the less sympathy they may feel for simple meat beings.
Imagine immortal cult leaders who propagate lies and invent religions, fine-tuning and perfecting their dogma over hundreds of years. Or perhaps none of all that—maybe our minds are not made for immortality and digital minds will just become rigid and unproductive, retiring after a very long life, having experienced everything they could ever want to.
It's hard to predict how much good or bad a self-improving mind could do with hundreds or thousands of years of free time.
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