American Scientist Planning On Uploading His Own Brain into a Computer

It is a plan taken straight from the pages of a science fiction novel - and potentially a way to exist forever.
A San Francisco inventor has revealed plans for a system to upload his brain to a computer. He hopes to be able to replicate the human brain as a mechanical system.

Randal Koene says the key to this is the SIM - a 'Substrate-Independent Mind.' By mapping the brain, reducing its activity to computations, and reproducing those computations in code, Koene argued, humans could live indefinitely, emulated by silicon.

'When I say emulation, you should think of it, for example, in the same sense as emulating a Macintosh on a PC,' he told a recent San Francisco conference. 'It's kind of like platform-independent code.' The thing that makes all of this possible is a 'Substrate-Independent Mind.'

This, according to Koene, is not merely an artificial intelligence, but a human mind downloaded to a computer. Neuroscientists are 99.9% percent convinced that the brain is a mechanism, he says. It is something that computes, something that carries out functions. If you can figure out how it works, you can build a replacement for it.

'The idea that you can take a small piece of the brain and build a replica for it is very mainstream and well understood,' he recently told Vice.

'Why not do that with the whole brain? And then why not upload that to a computer so that we can process more data and store it better, the way a computer does, organizing thoughts into folders that we can access whenever we choose?'

He has set up an organisation, carboncopies to work on the technical and ethical issues around the project.