Dr. Ken Hayworth, Part 2 - Will you upload your mind?

There's probably very few neuroscientists, or only a fraction of neuroscientists that would agree with this statement, I suppose: But, mind uploading is the logical conclusion of an advanced neuroscience. It's just the logical conclusion. We can't really understand something unless we can build that thing. So, if we really understand how the brain works, we will be able to build that brain. From all the research that I've done so far, the best method we have currently for preserving who we are is not cryonics. From what I've seen so far, the best method would be chemical fixation. Why? Because that's what scientists use to study the brain. That's what we use to preserve neural structures when we want to understand how the neural structures function. And whereas cryonics has been developed by a handful of researchers with very limited funds, electron microscopy of neural tissue is being done by the entire neuroscience community. I work with the technology that takes small pieces of brain tissue, and maps those connections at their basic level of circuit connectivity. So, I take fly brains, and I map it at the nanometer scale in three dimensions, and get all of the neural circuitry within those. And I fully expect I will be able to read off the algorithms that control the fly flying around. That's what neuroscience has been telling us for all these years, and we're doing that now. We're testing it with connectomes. There's a road map to getting to a whole mind upload. I'm trying to lay out the technology that could get us there. The first step is to chemically fix and plastic-embed your brain. It's just that preserved brain is filled with the most toxic poisons that you can imagine. It is preserving the structure of the brain, but is not preserving the ability for those proteins to get back into their old routines. What's going to happen is that the preserved brain is going to be sliced up into pieces. And those slices are going to go to different electron microscope machines that will then slice them up even finer, to get very high-resolution maps of where every neuron connects. Once you get that high resolution map of how every neuron connects to every neuron, that is like having a map of the circuit diagram of your computer - and it's information on the hard drive and everything else that is the information processing on that computer. That map really contains all of our memories, it contains all of our skills all of our ability to perceive stuff: All of the routines that that create our self-model. All that has to happen to make those 'alive' again is to take that map, and put it into a simulation of the computation that used to go on in that brain. You hook that simulation up to a robotic body or a virtual world, and the person will be 'alive' again. That is my perspective. The first step is to chemically fix and plastic-embed your brain: That has not been demonstrated for anything larger than a mouse, and that has just been barely done. Right now the technology is available to map about 1/10th of a cubic-millimeter of brain tissue at the necessary resolution. A million dollar instrument, working for several months, and we get that tenth of a cubic millimeter. To do a whole human brain, that has to be scaled up 100 million fold. Scaling up the technology to read off the circuit diagram of the brain is a prerequisite to mind uploading. But the type of circuit that a brain has is very different from a computer, and the type a program that a brain has is very different from the type of program that you have on your computer. You also need to know the function of those neurons. And those are experiments that are ongoing. The field of neuroscience is discovering the different types of neurons, how they interact with each other, what ion channels open at which times and under which voltages: Creating the knowledge that would be needed to interpret a full circuit diagram of the brain. President Barack Obama: "The next great American project: That's what we're calling the Brain Initiative. There's this enormous mystery - waiting to be unlocked. Ken Hayworth: Getting to a mind upload is not something that is going to happen in the next 20 years, or even probably thirty years. It's going to be way out there, and when we do it'll probably be one person, with an Apollo scale project behind doing that first upload. Would I want to be the first person? The tenth person? The hundredth? I would want to be the first person! I would have loved to have been the first person on the Moon. And there was a line of people behind Neil Armstrong that would have gratefully gotten on that rocket, knowing that there was a good chance that it could blow up, because that is adventure! That is the height of adventure: to step on another planet. And that's nothing compared to what we're talking about! We're talking about 'setting foot' - the first person to 'set foot,' if you will - in cyberspace. There will be a line of people once this technology gets to the step of the Gemini Program, or Mercury Program, or something like that: There will be a line of people that will want to be the first.