Is it possible to download consciousness

It depends, however, on technology that has not yet been invented, so nobody knows when mind uploading might become available. The brain relies on an elegant, underlying principle: A simple working part, the neuron, is repeated over and over to create complexity. The human brain contains about 86 billion neurons interconnected by about trillion synapses.

Information flows and transforms through those vast connected networks in complex and unpredictable patterns, creating the mind. You may change your billing preferences at any time in the Customer Center or call Customer Service. What takes a cat one second might take the Blue Gene supercomputer ten or even a hundred seconds, depending on the complexity of the task. Other barriers to constructing human-scale brain simulations include storage space and sheer processing power.

A complete map of the human brain containing detailed information about each neuron and synapse would occupy about 20, terabytes and require flops floating point operations per second of processing power to function.

Nevertheless, the future is bright. Additionally, as storage capacities continue to increase, it will be more feasible and economical to store digital maps of human brains. As an indicator, in , the largest cortical simulation contained about eight million neurons—the equivalent of half a mouse brain—and just four years later, scientists are capable of emulating brains comprised of over 1.

In a still more challenging scenario, the states of individual proteins phosphorylation states, exact spatial distribution, articulation with neighboring proteins, and so on will need to be scanned and stored.

It should also be noted that a simulation of the central nervous system by itself may not be sufficient for a good simulation of experience: other aspects of the body may require inclusion, such as the endocrine system, which sends and receives signals from the brain.

These considerations potentially lead to billions of trillions of variables that need to be stored and emulated. The other major technical hurdle is that the simulated brain must be able to modify itself. We need not only the pieces and parts, we also the physics of their ongoing interactions — for example, the activity of transcription factors that travel to the nucleus and cause gene expression, the dynamic changes in location and strength of the synapses, and so on.

Unless your simulated experiences change the structure of your simulated brain, you will be unable to form new memories and will have no sense of the passage of time. Under those circumstances, is there any point in immortality? The good news is that computing power is blossoming sufficiently quickly that we are likely to make it within a half century. Checkout operators? Construction workers? All of these jobs are probably for the chopping block in the medium to long term.

Robotics and artificial intelligence will take them over. The rest of our jobs, our contributions to the larger world, are done through the mind, and if the mind can be uploaded, it can keep doing the same job. A politician can work from cyberspace just as well as from real space. So can a teacher, or a manager, or a therapist, or a journalist, or the guy in the complaints department.

The CEO of a company, a Steve Jobs type who has shaped up a sweet set of neural connections in his brain that makes him exceptional at his work, can manage from a remote, simulated office. If he must shake hands, he can take temporary possession of a humanoid robot, a kind of shared rent-a-bot, and spend a few hours in the real world, meeting and greeting. Both worlds would be equally real. The foundation world would be full of people who are mere youngsters — mainly under the age of 80 — who are still accumulating valuable experience.

Their unspoken responsibility would be to gain wisdom and experience before joining the ranks of the cloud world. The balance of power and culture would shift rapidly to the cloud. How could it not? In that scenario, the foundation world becomes a kind of larval stage for immature minds, and the cloud world is where life really begins.

Mind uploading could transform our culture and civilisation more profoundly than anything in our past. What happens if your mind lives for ever on the internet? Illustration by James Melaugh. Are brain implants the future of thinking? Read more. Neuroscientists decode brain speech signals into written text.