Uploading Minds: The Race for Whole Brain Emulation (WBE) and Its Profound Implications

Introduction: From Sci-Fi to Scientific Quest

Imagine a future where you could upload your mind into a computer and live indefinitely in a digital form. This concept – once confined to science fiction – is now the subject of serious scientific research and futurist dreams. It’s known as Whole Brain Emulation (WBE), or more popularly mind uploading. The basic idea is to create a software replica of a person’s brain that reproduces the same patterns of thinking, memory, and consciousness as the original. In theory, the uploaded mind would behave and experience the world just like the human brain it came from en.wikipedia.org. Proponents see WBE as a potential path to “digital immortality,” allowing individuals to transcend biological death and perhaps live forever as computer-based beings en.wikipedia.org. Skeptics, however, note that achieving this is enormously challenging and raises profound questions. As of 2025, whole brain emulation remains an aspirational goal – but one that neuroscience and technology are steadily inching toward through remarkable advances. Below, we’ll explore what WBE is, how it works, its scientific foundations, the progress made so far, and the philosophical, ethical, and legal questions that arise when we talk about copying a human mind.

What Is Whole Brain Emulation?

Whole Brain Emulation (WBE) refers to the process of mapping a biological brain in such detail that it can be recreated as an identical functioning model in a digital substrate. In simpler terms, WBE means making a digital copy of a brain that can think and feel the same way as the original brain. This digital brain “emulation” wouldn’t just simulate generic brain activity; it would replicate the unique neural connections and functions of a specific person’s mind carboncopies.org. The goal is that the software brain would respond to inputs and generate behavior indistinguishable from how the person’s organic brain would respond en.wikipedia.org. In principle, this emulated mind could then exist inside a computer or robot, or in a full virtual reality environment, experiencing life without being tied to a mortal body.

It’s important to distinguish emulation from a mere simulation or AI model. A simulation might imitate how a brain works on a general level, but an emulation aims to reproduce the exact information processing of one individual’s brain carboncopies.org. If successful, the emulated mind would have the same memories, personality, and consciousness as the person who was copied. Advocates say such an upload “operates in an identical manner to the brain in the biological substrate,” essentially carrying on the person’s mind in a new medium carboncopies.org. This concept assumes a functional view of the mind: namely, that mental processes result from physical neural activity, and if you can reproduce that activity in another substrate (like silicon), the mind and consciousness will also be reproduced carboncopies.org. In this view, nothing “mystical” ties consciousness to biological tissue – it’s the pattern and function that matter, not the medium carboncopies.org.

WBE is also sometimes called “mind uploading”, “mind transfer”, or “substrate-independent mind”. The idea has enormous appeal in futurism and transhumanism circles because of its revolutionary implications. If minds can be uploaded, aging and disease of the body need not mean the end of one’s life – your mind could continue in a computer, potentially indefinitely. You could live in virtual worlds or robotic bodies, and even gain capabilities beyond normal human limits. As one WBE research foundation puts it, an uploaded person might “live a life untethered, free from the physical constraints of a body,” with enhanced memory, new senses, and lifespans of centuries or more carboncopies.org. In short, whole brain emulation could enable radical human enhancement and life extension, fundamentally changing what it means to be human.

How Would You Upload a Brain? The Science Behind WBE

Achieving WBE requires tackling a formidable technical challenge: copying the entire complexity of a brain. A human brain contains about 86 billion neurons interconnected by perhaps 100 trillion synapses – the junctions through which neurons signal each other. All of the subtle patterns in these connections (often called the “connectome”) and the strengths of those synapses encode our memories, skills, and personality. In addition, there are many supporting cells, chemical gradients, and dynamic electrical activity patterns that contribute to brain function. To upload a mind, scientists would need to capture all the relevant information from the brain and then reconstruct it in a computer model. This breaks down into a few major steps:

1. Scanning the Brain (Mapping the Connectome): The first step is to scan or image the biological brain at a very high resolution to map every neuron and synapse – in other words, to obtain the complete wiring diagram of the brain. This complete map of neural connections is the connectome. Building an individual’s connectome is considered an essential prerequisite for WBE carboncopies.org. Today’s most powerful brain mapping technologies include advanced forms of electron microscopy, which can image brain tissue at nanometer resolutions. In fact, researchers have already used electron microscopes to map the entire connectome of small organisms. A notable achievement was mapping the brain of a fruit fly (Drosophila), which has about 135,000 neurons, producing a detailed diagram of roughly 50 million synapses connecting those neurons smithsonianmag.com. This was a monumental task – scientists sliced a fly’s brain into thousands of ultrathin layers and took tens of millions of images to catalog every connectionsmithsonianmag.com. The result, published in 2024, is “the most complete brain map of any organism to date,” and researchers even verified its functionality by running simple simulations on the fly’s neural circuit smithsonianmag.com. For comparison, the only other creatures with fully mapped brains so far are a larval worm and a larval sea squirt with only a few hundred neurons smithsonianmag.com – highlighting how ambitious mapping a human brain (with billions of neurons) will be.
2. Recording Dynamic Activity (Beyond Structure): While mapping the static connections is crucial, a brain’s function also depends on dynamic properties – how neurons fire, the strengths of synapses, and chemical states. Some researchers are exploring ways to record large-scale brain activity to augment the connectome. For very small brains like the roundworm C. elegans (which has 302 neurons), scientists can already record the activity of every neuron in real timecarboncopies.org. However, for larger brains, this is far harder. There is ongoing progress in techniques like advanced fluorescence microscopy and electrode arrays to capture functional data. In one recent breakthrough, a team mapped both structure and function in a cubic millimeter of mouse brain tissue (roughly 75,000 neurons), by first recording neuronal activity in a live mouse and then imaging that same tissue with electron microscopy. This project, reported in 2025, yielded the largest functional connectome of a mammalian brain piece ever created – “hundreds of thousands of cells and around half a billion connections” reconstructed in 3D engineering.princeton.edu. Such efforts show the trend toward integrating wiring diagrams with information on how signals flow, which will be invaluable for WBE.
3. Building the Digital Brain Model: Once the brain’s structure (and possibly key dynamic parameters) are captured, the next step is to create a software model that mirrors this structure. Essentially, scientists would translate the connectome into a giant computational model of neurons and synapses. Each neuron might be represented by equations simulating how it fires electrical impulses (action potentials) in response to inputs, based on known neurophysiology. The connections in the model would match the scanned synaptic connections. The idea is that when run on a computer, this model would exhibit the same patterns of activity as the real brain, thus “replaying” the person’s mind. In practice, this is a staggering computing task. The human brain’s processing capability is often likened to exaFLOPs (10^18 operations per second), far beyond what today’s computers can emulate in real time. However, computing power continues to grow, and specialized neuromorphic hardware (brain-inspired chips) or supercomputers might eventually handle the load. Indeed, in 2015 the Blue Brain Project (a Swiss research initiative) announced a milestone simulation of 30,000 neurons from a rat’s brain, complete with 37 million synapses, running on an IBM supercomputer en.wikipedia.org. While that is only a tiny fragment of a brain (a single cortical microcircuit), it demonstrated that biologically detailed simulation is possible on a small scale. Researchers are now striving to optimize simulations and compress data. One technique is to simplify neuron models or use AI to fill in details. For example, the Blue Brain Project has explored using “topological algorithms” to generate realistic neuronal networks and even create digital twin models of brain regions for experimentation engineering.princeton.edu, en.wikipedia.org. The ultimate goal would be a complete software reconstruction of all neuronal interactions in the brain.
4. Running the Emulation: Finally, with a detailed model built, the system must be run as an emulation. The computer effectively becomes the new “body” for the brain’s processes. The emulation would need not only raw computing power but also substantial memory to store the vast network of connections. If all goes well, the digital brain will begin to function, producing electrical activity patterns akin to thoughts. It could then be connected to inputs and outputs so it can perceive and act. For instance, the emulated mind might be placed in a virtual reality environment where it receives simulated sensory data (sight, sound, etc.) and can control a virtual body. Alternately, it could be connected to a physical robot, giving it a mechanical body to interact with the real world en.wikipedia.org. Notably, an uploaded mind would require sensory and interactive capabilities to remain sane and functional. Scientists point out that a disembodied brain with no sensory input would endure extreme sensory deprivation, a condition known to cause hallucinations and psychological distress holistic.news. Thus, any realistic WBE scenario must provide rich stimuli and possibly even emulate hormones and bodily signals to keep the mind grounded in an experience. In short, uploading the brain is only part of the challenge – you also have to upload (or simulate) a suitable world for the brain to live in.

It’s worth mentioning that two main approaches have been proposed for how WBE might be achieved: (a) the “scan-and-copy” method described above (also called copy-and-upload), and (b) a “gradual replacement” method. In scan-and-copy, one would take an existing brain, scan it destructively, and build a digital copy – likely meaning the original brain is either destroyed or at least disconnected in the process carboncopies.org. In contrast, gradual replacement envisions slowly swapping a living person’s neurons with tiny electronic implants one by one, so that the brain transitions to a synthetic, emulatable state without a single moment of “death.” Over time, the person’s brain becomes an implanted synthetic brain that can interface with computers – at which point it could be transferred entirely into software. This approach is highly speculative and far beyond current technology, but it’s intriguing because it might preserve the continuity of consciousness from biological to digital form. Some imagine using advanced brain–computer interfaces or nanotechnology to make this possible. However, experts argue that both methods likely converge to the same endpoint: a functioning emulation of the original mind. Whether one’s biological brain is gradually replaced or scanned at once, in both cases the original neurons cease to operate and their function is taken over by technology carboncopies.org. In other words, either path results in the mental processes “moving” to a new substrate, and theoretically either could preserve personal identity (this is a matter of debate, of course). Many believe the destructive scan-and-copy approach will be achievable sooner, given the rapid progress in brain imaging, whereas non-destructive uploading would require breakthroughs in implantable tech we don’t yet have carboncopies.org.

Scientific Foundations and Building Blocks

Whole brain emulation stands at the intersection of neuroscience, computer science, and engineering. Several scientific and technological domains are contributing pieces to the WBE puzzle:

Connectomics: This is the field of mapping brain connections. WBE is fundamentally built on connectomics – you need that detailed map to know what to emulate. Recent years have seen a connectomics boom, with projects mapping ever larger brains. Aside from the fruit fly mentioned earlier, a milestone in connectomics came in early 2023 when researchers published the first complete connectome of a fruit fly larva (with 3,000 neurons) smithsonianmag.com. By 2024, that was surpassed by the adult fruit fly connectome (≈139k neurons), and efforts are underway to map small mammals. One ambitious project funded by the U.S. intelligence community (IARPA’s MICrONS program) succeeded in mapping a 1 mm³ chunk of mouse cortex containing half a billion synaptic connections engineering.princeton.edu. These advances are giving scientists invaluable data on real neural circuits – effectively downpayments on the ultimate goal of a human brain map. There is even progress in faster imaging: a 2021 study demonstrated a technique to scan an entire monkey (macaque) brain at micrometer resolution in about 100 hours carboncopies.org. That method involved chemical preparation and very fast optical imaging of the brain, and it produced a whole primate brain map at unprecedented speed carboncopies.org. Although a monkey brain is smaller and less complex than a human’s, it shows that scaling up connectome mapping is at least conceivable in the future.
Computational Neuroscience & AI: To turn connectome data into a working mind model, researchers rely on computational neuroscience – creating mathematical models of how networks of neurons process information. Decades of research have produced models for electrical spiking in neurons, synaptic plasticity (learning), and neural network dynamics. These models form the toolkit for building an emulated brain. Interestingly, the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), especially deep learning, is a parallel field that both benefits from neuroscience and contributes to it. Modern AI’s artificial neural networks are very abstracted cousins of real neural networks, but as they grow more complex, AI researchers are looking to brain architecture for inspiration. In fact, some futurists discuss WBE as one route to achieving Artificial General Intelligence – instead of programming an AI from scratch, you emulate a human brain to obtain human-level (or greater) intelligence en.wikipedia.org. Projects like neuromorphic computing also straddle AI and neuroscience, creating hardware that mimics brain circuits. The synergy is such that any progress in simulating brain components could improve AI, and vice versa. For example, the detailed mapping of mouse visual cortex mentioned above was partly motivated by the goal “to reverse engineer the algorithms of the brain for use in next-generation machine learning”, according to the program sponsors engineering.princeton.edu. Thus, whole brain emulation research is closely linked with efforts to understand natural intelligence and build smarter machines.
Brain–Computer Interfaces and Neural Prosthetics: While not the same as WBE, the field of BCIs and neural prosthetics provides important stepping stones. These technologies involve connecting computers to living brains, either to read neural signals or to write information into the brain. We already have cochlear implants that restore hearing by interfacing with the auditory nerve, retinal/visual prosthetics that provide rudimentary sight to the blind, and motor BCIs that allow paralyzed patients to move robotic limbs by thought livescience.com. Remarkably, researchers have even developed a hippocampal prosthesis – an implant intended to mimic part of the hippocampus (a brain region essential for forming memories). In experiments, an early version of this device could record neural activity and then stimulate the hippocampus in a way that helped encode long-term memories, effectively acting as a memory implant carboncopies.org. These achievements show that it’s possible to replace or augment portions of brain function with devices, which is directly relevant to WBE. One can think of WBE as the logical extreme: replacing every part of the brain with an equivalent computation. Each successful neural prosthetic (for memory, vision, movement, etc.) is a proof of concept that technology can emulate specific neural functions carboncopies.org. Moreover, brain-computer interfaces could eventually serve as the bridge for a gradual upload – for instance, a high-bandwidth BCI could progressively map and transfer mental content to a digital platform. Companies like Neuralink (founded by Elon Musk) are working on ultra-fine electrode arrays to read large volumes of neural data, which might one day assist in uploading, although their near-term goal is medical (e.g. helping disabled patients communicate). In summary, the better we get at interfacing brains with computers, the more feasible the mind-machine merger required for WBE becomes.
Cryonics and Brain Preservation: Another field adjacent to WBE is brain preservation – essentially, the attempt to chemically or cryogenically preserve brains in a state that keeps all the neural connections intact, potentially for very long periods. The idea is that someone could have their brain preserved at death (or even before death, if one were desperate enough) and stored until technology advances enough to scan and upload it. Recent progress here is notable: In 2018, a research company won the Brain Preservation Foundation’s Large Mammal Prize by successfully preserving an entire pig brain with all its synaptic structure intact theguardian.com. They used a method called aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation (ASC) – essentially first infusing the brain with chemical fixatives to “lock” the synapses in place, then cryogenically freezing it theguardian.com. Electron microscope images confirmed that the pig brain’s connectome (potentially 150 trillion synaptic connections) was extraordinarily well-preserved theguardian.com. Of course, that brain is biologically dead (the chemicals are lethal), but as one science article noted, all the preserved information “could potentially be uploaded… after a long wait. Would this then be ‘you’?” theguardian.com. The successful preservation of a large, complex brain is a big step because it suggests we could store brains for future uploading. Indeed, a startup called Nectome sprang from this research, offering a service to terminally ill people to preserve their brains with ASC for future mind uploading. However, Nectome made headlines (and raised ethical alarms) in 2018 when it was reported that their process would be “100% fatal” – essentially, they have to kill you to preserve your brain perfectly theguardian.com. Twenty-five people (including a well-known tech CEO) had put down $10,000 deposits for this speculative promise theguardian.com. The controversy underscored how WBE straddles a line between groundbreaking science and ethical quandary – and how eager some are for even a slim chance at digital immortality.

From Brain Maps to Mind Models: Progress So Far

How close are we to achieving whole brain emulation? It’s still a distant goal, but steady progress is being made on multiple fronts. Here we outline some major milestones and projects that have brought WBE concepts from theory toward reality:

1950s–1980s – Early Ideas: The notion of duplicating consciousness predates modern computing in science fiction, but scientists and futurists started musing about it more concretely by the late 20th century. Notably, Hans Moravec, a robotics expert, wrote in 1988 about “mind uploading” as a future technology, predicting it might be possible in the 21st century. He envisioned robotic bodies for uploaded minds and even described a hypothetical gradual replacement procedure (sometimes called the “Moravec transfer”). These early ideas planted the seed that a mind could be seen as software independent of its hardware (the body).
1990s–2000s – Theoretical Foundations: As neuroscience and computing advanced, serious studies appeared. In 2003, philanthropist Ray Kurzweil (now a director of engineering at Google) popularized the idea of achieving digital immortality by 2045, tied to his prediction of a technological singularity. Kurzweil and other futurists at the 2013 Global Future 2045 Congress boldly forecast that “by 2045, humans will achieve digital immortality by uploading their minds to computers.” livescience.com This was accompanied by the 2045 Initiative, a project launched by Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov, which laid out a roadmap to transfer human consciousness into robotic avatars within a few decades livescience.com. Meanwhile, in academia, the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) at Oxford published a seminal technical report “Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap” in 2008 en.wikipedia.org. Authors Anders Sandberg and Nick Bostrom examined the required steps and estimated that, if trends in computing and brain-scanning continued, WBE might be achieved sometime in the second half of the 21st century. They treated it as a matter of when, not if – assuming no fundamental barriers prevent it.
Neuroscience Flagships: In the 2010s, several big-science projects aimed at simulating or mapping brains got underway. In 2005, neuroscientist Henry Markram founded the Blue Brain Project in Switzerland, with the goal of simulating a mammalian brain in software. By 2007, Blue Brain had completed an initial model of a rat neocortical column (a tiny brain circuit), and in 2015 it announced a much more detailed simulation of “a part of a rat brain with 30,000 neurons and nearly 40 million synapses” en.wikipedia.org. This was hailed as a “first draft” digital reconstruction of a brain microcircuit. Markram was also the driving force behind the Human Brain Project (HBP) – a €1 billion European Union flagship launched in 2013. The HBP’s original vision was to simulate an entire human brain within 10 years en.wikipedia.org, a goal widely viewed as over-ambitious. The project faced criticism and had to scale back its claims, refocusing on developing neuroscience tools and platforms (like the EBRAINS computing infrastructure). By the time the HBP ended in 2023, it had not produced a full brain emulation, but it contributed to neuroscience in other ways (e.g. brain atlases, neuromorphic chips, and further development of simulation software). In the United States, the BRAIN Initiative (launched in 2013) poured billions into developing new brain-mapping technologies. Its focus was more on fundamental neuroscience and medical applications than WBE, but advances from that program – such as high-speed imaging, better electrodes, and connectomic techniques – are directly relevant to the WBE toolkit.
Connectome Milestones: The holy grail of mapping a human connectome is still unmet, but incremental victories are worth noting. The first (and still only) complete connectome of an animal was achieved in 1986 for the tiny nematode worm C. elegans (302 neurons) – a painstaking manual effort that took over a dozen years. Fast forward to the 2010s and 2020s, and we see an explosion of connectomics:
- 2019: Researchers mapped the first complete insect brain – the larval fruit fly – containing 3,000 neurons smithsonianmag.com.
- 2020: A team at Janelia Research Campus and Google completed a draft connectome of the adult fruit fly’s central brain (about 25,000 neurons at that time) carboncopies.org. This was later expanded to the full fly brain.
- 2023: The full adult fruit fly connectome was finished and published (≈139k neurons, 54 million synapses) smithsonianmag.com, marking the largest connectome ever mapped. This achievement required innovative AI algorithms and crowdsourced proofreading (via the FlyWire consortium) to reconstruct every neuron in the fly’s poppy-seed-sized brain smithsonianmag.com.
- 2025: The MICrONS consortium (with teams from Princeton, Baylor College of Medicine, and Allen Institute) published the most detailed map of a mammalian brain region to date – a 1 mm³, 3D section of mouse visual cortex encompassing half a billion connections among roughly 75,000 neurons engineering.princeton.edu. This took 9 years of work and involved imaging 28,000 slices with an electron microscope and using AI to stitch them together. It’s “the largest and most detailed rendering of neural circuits in a mammalian brain” so far engineering.princeton.edu.
- These milestones illustrate a trajectory: from 300 connections (worm) to 50 million (fly) to 500 million (mouse cortex) – each order of magnitude brings us closer to the trillions needed for a human brain. They also drive home the point that current technology can map small brains and tiny chunks of big brains, but scaling to an entire human brain (with ~100,000 times more neurons than a fly) will require further breakthroughs in automation and data processing.
Partial Simulations and Prototypes: While a full human brain emulation is out of reach for now, researchers have dabbled with simulating smaller brains or brain components as testbeds:
- The OpenWorm project is a volunteer-led effort that successfully created a software simulation of the C. elegans worm’s nervous system (302 neurons). Impressively, in 2014 the OpenWorm team loaded this simulated worm brain into a simple robot made of LEGO pieces. The robot, guided by the worm’s connectome-based software, began to behave like the worm – for example, it would move forward or backward in response to stimuli the same way the real worm would, despite having no pre-programmed instructions smithsonianmag.com. This demonstrated the principle of an uploaded mind controlling a body (albeit a worm mind in a robot body!). It was a striking proof-of-concept that even a rudimentary emulation can exhibit lifelike behaviors given the right sensorimotor connections.
- Neuroscientists have also simulated small networks of human neurons or mouse neurons to study emergent behaviors. In 2020, for instance, the Blue Brain Project published a detailed digital reconstruction of a section of human cortex (the 3D microstructure of synapses in a bit of human hippocampus), providing insights into synaptic arrangement carboncopies.org. And as noted, Blue Brain’s 2015 rat microcircuit was a landmark demonstrating that thousands of neurons with realistic properties can be modeled and produce biologically plausible activity patterns.
- These partial simulations are important stepping stones. They allow researchers to test modeling techniques, verify that simulated neurons can in principle support complex brain functions, and identify bottlenecks in computing. Each increase in the scale of simulation – from dozens of neurons to thousands – teaches lessons about how to optimize and what emergent properties appear. For example, one surprise from the Blue Brain simulation was the discovery of high-dimensional geometric structures (cliques of neurons forming complexes up to 11 dimensions) in the network, which might explain some of the brain’s computational ability en.wikipedia.org. Such findings hint at how much we stand to learn by digitally reconstructing brains.
- Expert Perceptions and Timeline: There is a wide spectrum of views on when or if full WBE will be achieved. On one hand, optimistic futurists like Kurzweil have famously set dates like 2045 for mind uploading. The excitement in the early 2010s was palpable – major media covered the possibility of “living forever in a computer” within decades. However, many neuroscientists take a more cautious stance. For instance, Dr. Kenneth Miller, a neuroscientist at Columbia University, argued that capturing the connectome may not be enough, because the brain’s function also relies on complex biochemical dynamics and molecular states that a simple structural scan might miss en.wikipedia.org. Miller suggested that an “absolute duplication” of a specific human mind might be hundreds of years away given the daunting complexity en.wikipedia.org. Likewise, in 2025, cognitive psychologist Dobromir Rahnev stated, “Theoretically, mind uploading is possible. However, we are currently very far from this goal,” estimating it could take on the order of 200 years, and that he would be shocked if it worked in the next 100 years holistic.news. He noted we haven’t yet figured out basic things like how to replace even a single neuron with an artificial one in a working brain holistic.news. Many researchers echo the sentiment that significant unknowns remain: we don’t yet know exactly what level of detail is required to successfully emulate consciousness (neurons and synapses might not be the whole story – aspects like neurotransmitter levels, gene expression, or glial cells could matter) holistic.news. Despite the uncertainty, research continues steadily because even the intermediate goals (like mapping brain circuits and building better neural models) yield valuable scientific and medical insights.

In summary, current advancements as of 2025 have delivered powerful brain-mapping tools, partial neural simulations, and real-world demonstrations of brain-data integration (BCIs and prosthetics). We have seen complete mind uploads for simple organisms (worms, flies) and significant chunks of more complex brains mapped and modeled. However, the consensus is that human whole brain emulation is still many big breakthroughs away – likely decades at a minimum, and possibly much longer. That hasn’t stopped a growing number of institutes, projects, and even startups from pushing the boundaries:

Major Players in WBE Research (a non-exhaustive list):

Blue Brain Project (EPFL, Switzerland): Focused on biologically detailed simulations of mammalian brain circuits. Achievements include the 2015 rat cortical column simulation and ongoing development of brain atlases and simulation software en.wikipedia.org.
Human Brain Project (EU): A 10-year European initiative (2013–2023) that, while falling short of simulating a human brain, produced tools like the EBRAINS platform, neuromorphic computing systems (SpiNNaker and BrainScaleS), and a deeper understanding of multilevel brain modeling en.wikipedia.org.
Allen Institute for Brain Science (USA): Mapped cell types and connectivity in mouse and human brains. Co-led the MICrONS project for the 1 mm³ mouse cortex map engineering.princeton.edu. Provides openly available data and resources that feed into modeling efforts.
Janelia Research (HHMI) & FlyWire Consortium: Pioneers in high-resolution connectomics, delivered the full fruit fly brain connectome through massive electron microscopy imaging and crowd-sourced proofreading smithsonianmag.com.
Brain Preservation Foundation: A nonprofit that ran the Brain Preservation Prize and advocates for preservation as a stepping stone to future WBE. They verify preservation quality (e.g., the prize-winning rabbit and pig brain preservations in 2016 and 2018)theguardian.com.
Carboncopies Foundation: An organization explicitly dedicated to advancing substrate-independent minds and WBE. It serves as a hub for researchers in the field, tracks progress, and explores the technical and ethical dimensions of mind uploading.
OpenWorm: An open science collaborative project; while limited to C. elegans, it represents the first instance of a complete living organism’s brain emulation controlling a machine smithsonianmag.com. It demonstrates open-source approaches to neuro-simulation.
Neuralink and other BCI companies: While not aiming at WBE, their work on high-bandwidth brain implants could someday facilitate reading out or writing in large volumes of neural data, which is relevant for scanning or gradual replacement methods.
Nectome and neurotech startups: A few startups on the fringe, like Nectome, explicitly talk about mind uploading and are exploring brain embalming techniques for preservation theguardian.com. Others focus on AI-driven analysis of brain data, which could assist in connectome reconstruction.

These efforts, spanning government-funded big science to DIY open projects and private ventures, are collectively moving us toward the distant goal of WBE. But as progress continues, it’s becoming increasingly clear that mind uploading is not just a technical project – it’s one that forces us to confront deep questions about the mind, the self, and society.

Philosophical Puzzles: Is an Uploaded Mind Really You?

Whole brain emulation provokes profound philosophical questions about consciousness and identity. At the heart of it: What exactly is the “self,” and would a digital copy of your brain have it? If you could scan your brain and start up the emulation, would that digital mind experience being you, with the same continuous sense of self – or would it just be a clever impostor? This is not merely academic; the entire appeal of mind uploading (escaping death, continuing one’s life in a new form) hinges on the assumption that the emulated mind truly inherits your identity and consciousness.

Those who favor WBE often subscribe to a philosophy of mind called functionalism (the idea that mental states are defined by their functional patterns, not by the material that implements them). In this view, if the emulation replicates the complex functional relationships of your brain, it will have your memories, personality, and awareness carboncopies.org. Uploading proponents argue that consciousness is an “emergent property” of the brain’s information processing, so if you copy that processing accurately, the copy will be conscious in the same way you are carboncopies.org. They point out there’s nothing mystical about neurons – they follow the laws of physics – so in principle a computer could execute the same operations. In fact, some theorists suggest consciousness is substrate-independent, comparing the brain to a piece of software that could run on different hardware if coded properlycarboncopies.org.

However, even if we accept that a brain emulation can be conscious, the personal identity issue is thorny. If your brain is copied, do “you” reside in the original or the copy – or both? Imagine you undergo scan-and-upload tomorrow. The computer is turned on, and a software mind wakes up with all your memories, thinking it’s you. Meanwhile, your biological brain (if it wasn’t destroyed) is still sitting there, also thinking it’s you. Now there are two “yous.” Which one is the real one? Some philosophers say both are you – this is the idea of “branching identity.” As bizarre as it sounds, they argue that identity can split, much like a cell dividing. Each descendant mind has equal claim to the earlier identity, at least initially carboncopies.org. An analogy is made to split-brain patients in neuroscience: when the corpus callosum (which connects the brain’s hemispheres) is cut, it’s been observed that the person can seem to have two independent spheres of consciousness in one skull, each with its own perceptions carboncopies.org. Yet originally it was one person – their identity “branched” into two streams. By that analogy, a mind and its upload would share the original identity up to the moment of copying, after which they diverge into separate individuals (just as identical twins share an origin but become distinct people). This view suggests an upload is not a fake, but rather a continuation of you – just not the only continuation.

Others are not convinced. A common intuition is that an upload, especially one created by destructive scanning (where your original brain might even be dissected), is just a copy – perhaps a very convincing copy, but not you. People often invoke the example of a Star Trek teleporter: it disassembles Captain Kirk on Earth and reassembles him on Mars. Is the person on Mars still Kirk or just an exact copy that believes it’s Kirk? If the original were not destroyed, having two Kirks would make it obvious something changed. Critics argue that what matters is the continuous stream of consciousness. In a gradual replacement scenario, maybe continuity is preserved (since there’s never a moment “you” were turned off), but in a scan-copy-upload, the original mind is interrupted (or destroyed) and a new one starts elsewhere. That break, they claim, is essentially death of the original, with a new being inheriting your memories. “Would this then be ‘you’?” asked psychologist Susan Blackmore regarding future upload revival, expressing deep doubts theguardian.com. She mused that we are “far more than just brains and stored memories… we are whole embodied humans, deeply embedded in social worlds.” An upload might replicate your brain’s data, but lacking your body and your exact context, can one really say it’s you in a meaningful sense? theguardian.com

This debate ties into ancient philosophical questions: Is personal identity about having the same physical substance, or about continuity of patterns, or about something else like an immaterial soul? Religious perspectives come into play here. A study by cognitive scientist Michael Laakasuo found that people’s attitudes toward mind uploading often align with their belief in an afterlife en.wikipedia.org. Those with strong religious convictions might see uploading as either impossible (since the soul cannot be copied) or even blasphemous – a challenge to divine providence. Indeed, if one believes an immortal soul is non-physical, then an uploaded mind, no matter how perfect, would be an empty shell without true self-awareness. On the other hand, some religious or spiritual thinkers have been intrigued by the idea that maybe the soul is informational and could be preserved through these means; but this is a minority view.

Another mind-bending question: Could an emulation be conscious but different from the original? For instance, what if copying the brain gives rise to a mind that has all your memories but doesn’t subjectively feel like it’s you? Some worry about a scenario where the upload behaves exactly like you (fooling everyone, even itself, that it’s the same person), yet somehow lacks qualia – the real subjective experience. This is essentially a version of the “philosophical zombie” or the Chinese Room argument applied to uploads (John Searle’s thought experiment questioning if simulation equals understanding). However, if one accepts functionalism, this scenario shouldn’t happen: identical function implies identical conscious experience. Still, the hard problem of consciousness means we won’t truly know until and unless we actually create an upload and perhaps devise tests or trust the self-reports of the uploaded entity.

In summary, the philosophical consensus (to the extent there is one) is that if WBE succeeds technically, an emulated mind would likely have consciousness and could be considered a continuation of the person’s self – but personal identity may become a more fluid concept. We might have to get used to the idea that a person can exist simultaneously in two substrates, or that “death” becomes ambiguous (is it when the biological original stops, or only when all copies stop?). These are not easy questions, and they lead directly into the ethical and legal implications of mind uploading.

Ethical and Social Implications: Mortality, Equality, and Minds in Machines

The prospect of whole brain emulation raises a host of ethical issues. Some are immediate (e.g. is it ethical to euthanize someone to preserve their brain for uploading?), while others are long-term (e.g. what happens to society if a fraction of people become immortal digital beings?). Let’s consider a few key concerns:

Consent and the Value of Life: Current WBE-related experiments on human brains are mostly limited to post-mortem studies or neurosurgery patients who donate tissue. But a full upload would require acting on a living person’s brain in unprecedented ways. The Nectome case highlighted a grisly scenario: a company effectively asking people to trade their biological life for a chance at digital revival theguardian.com. Even if an individual consents (perhaps due to terminal illness), is it ethical for scientists or companies to carry out a procedure that is certainly fatal in the short term and only hypothetically beneficial in the long term? Many say this treads dangerously close to assisted suicide or even homicide under the banner of technology. Until and unless there’s proof an upload can work, any such procedure could be seen as preying on the fear of death. This leads to calls for legal safeguards: for example, some ethicists argue there should be strict laws against commercialization of unproven mind uploading services (much like there are laws governing experimental medical treatments and euthanasia).
Digital Immortality for the Wealthy? If mind uploading does become feasible, there is a fear it could exacerbate social inequalities. Advanced life-extension technologies often raise the concern that they will be available only to the rich – those who can afford cutting-edge procedures. Philosopher Susan Blackmore cautioned that “what a horrible world it would be if rich old people could have their minds uploaded, taking resources from younger people on an already overcrowded planet.” theguardian.com The idea of a wealthy elite achieving digital immortality while the rest of humanity remains stuck with normal lifespans is a dystopian scenario often discussed in ethics circles. It could create a class of near-gods (hyper-intelligent, unaging uploads potentially controlling vast financial and computational resources) versus ordinary mortals. Issues of justice and fairness loom large: would it be acceptable to society if only a few get to “live” forever? Some suggest that if WBE becomes possible, it might need to be regulated or even provided as a public service to avoid extreme inequality in access to eternal life.
Overpopulation and Environment: On the flip side, if everyone could eventually upload, what would that mean for population? Digital beings don’t consume food or land, but they consume energy and computing hardware. An exponential increase in minds (especially if minds can be copied like files) might lead to a different kind of resource strain – competition for computing power or virtual real estate. Economist Robin Hanson, in his book “The Age of Em,” envisions a scenario where billions of uploaded minds (“ems”) run on servers, and because they can be copied and sped up, they create a rapidly accelerating economy – but also one where individual ems might be forked, retired, or deleted based on economic needs. This raises ethical questions about the value of individual lives in a world where copying and deleting minds could become routine operations.
Rights of Digital Persons: Perhaps the most urgent ethical/legal issue is how we would treat conscious software beings if and when they appear. Would an uploaded mind have the same rights as a natural human? This question is unprecedented, but some legal scholars are already pondering it. For instance, if you upload and your biological body dies, is the upload now legally you – with claim to your identity, property, citizenship, etc.? One might assume yes, especially if the upload was intended as a continuation. But what if there are two copies? Current legal systems do not know how to handle a person branching into multiple entities. Some have half-jokingly suggested treating newly created uploads as “digital minors” – requiring a period of guardianship by the original or some trustee until society figures out recognition en.wikipedia.org. Consider also marriage and family: could your spouse be legally married to both your biological and uploaded self? If you have children after uploading, are they the heirs or are your pre-upload biological children the heirs, or both? Lawmakers would face complex debates around inheritance, marriage, custody, and personal identity in the age of uploads en.wikipedia.org.
“Digital Human Rights”: Ensuring the humane treatment of uploaded minds would be a new frontier for human rights. A disturbing possibility is the abuse or exploitation of sentient software. For example, one could copy an upload and subject it to harmful experiments or endless labor without pay. If the copy can be reset or deleted at will, would that be considered murder or torture? The Wikipedia entry on mind uploading notes that if simulated minds are created, “it may be difficult to ensure the protection of ‘digital human rights’.” Researchers (or malicious hackers, or oppressive regimes) might secretly run copies of minds in accelerated virtual environments and make them endure all kinds of scenarios en.wikipedia.org. An upload could experience years of torment in a matter of real-time minutes if someone ran its program faster – a horrifying prospect if no safeguards exist. We would likely need new laws recognizing sentient software as persons or at least granting them protections. In 2017, the EU Parliament actually considered a resolution about the legal status of autonomous AI, suggesting the category of “electronic persons” for advanced AI/robots. Extending a similar concept to uploaded humans is both logical and contentious – some worry that granting full personhood to software could dilute human rights or create enforcement nightmares. But not granting them rights invites even worse scenarios (digital slaves, etc.). This is a debate that society would need to resolve, ideally before the first human brain upload is powered on.
Psychological and Social Effects: Another ethical dimension is the effect on relationships and society. If people can essentially live forever by uploading, does that change our values and motivations? Some argue it could reduce the urgency that gives life meaning – if you have centuries, how do concepts like ambition, risk, or “seize the day” change? There’s also the emotional challenge: imagine your loved ones are aging and dying in the physical world, but you continue on in the digital realm. Blackmore pointed out that an upload who wakes up in a future world might find it “completely inadequate” socially – everyone they knew is gone, and society may have changed so much that the resurrected person feels like a relic unable to fit in theguardian.com. This loneliness or alienation of the resurrected is a staple theme in science fiction (e.g. in the TV series Black Mirror, an uploaded consciousness is sometimes depicted as suffering when confined or when the world moves on without them). Ethically, should we even do that to someone – bring them back in a future where they might not cope? Perhaps these are problems each individual would choose for themselves, but they highlight that eternal life may come with existential pitfalls.
Malicious Uses and Security: A less often discussed risk is what happens if uploaded minds or brain data are misused. Brain data is arguably the most personal data there is – it’s literally the contents of your mind. If someone hacked into a stored connectome or an operating mind emulation, they could steal your very thoughts, memories, or identity. Brain emulations could be vulnerable to computer viruses or malware that could alter their thoughts or terminate them en.wikipedia.org. Even the possibility of “mind hacking” – like altering an upload’s personality or loyalty – must be considered. This introduces ethical and legal challenges around privacy and security. Would deleting or corrupting an upload be considered murder? Almost certainly yes, if we grant them personhood. So the cybersecurity of mind uploads could become a life-and-death matter. Some futurists note that an uploaded mind could be backed up like files, which on one hand means if something goes wrong you could restore from backup (a kind of digital reincarnation), but on the other hand unauthorized copies of a person could be made the same way one might pirate software. Laws may need to treat unpermitted copying of a person’s mind as equivalent to kidnapping or cloning.
Impact on Humanity: Zooming out, the arrival of WBE could be an event as disruptive as the advent of our species itself. We might see a divergence where some humans become “post-human” digital beings while others remain biological. This could create cultural and political rifts – even violence. Would uploads and non-uploads trust each other? Hanson speculates in The Age of Em that emulated minds (ems) might rapidly out-compete biological humans economically (since ems can work tirelessly, think faster on faster hardware, and copy themselves to meet labor demand) en.wikipedia.org. This could lead to social upheaval, with mass unemployment or worse for biological humans, unless managed. There’s also the possibility of a “brain emulation arms race”, where nations or companies that develop uploading first could create vast numbers of uploads (perhaps copies of brilliant scientists or soldiers) to gain dominance en.wikipedia.org. This might tempt rival nations to go to war or accelerate their own programs unsafely. In other words, WBE could introduce new security dilemmas on a global scale. All these issues imply that the transition to a society with uploads would need careful thought and likely international cooperation to avoid chaos.

In light of these ethical and social implications, many researchers emphasize the need for a framework of guidelines well before WBE becomes a reality. Discussions about “neuroethics” and “AI ethics” are already laying some groundwork. In 2014, Anders Sandberg published on the ethics of brain emulations, exploring scenarios and proposing principles (for example, he suggested a “Principle of Assumed Mindhood” – essentially, if there’s any uncertainty whether an emulated entity is conscious, we should err on the side of treating it as if it is, to avoid moral catastrophe of mistreating a person en.wikipedia.org). Concepts like “digital rights,” mind data privacy laws, and perhaps even new definitions of personhood will likely need to evolve. Humanity will face questions like: Do we have an obligation to preserve brains for future revival? Is opting for digital life a human right or just an option? Can an AI or upload be held responsible for crimes (and how do you punish software – by deletion, by reprogramming)? en.wikipedia.org These debates are no longer purely speculative; the early versions of them are happening now as we grapple with AI and neural tech ethics.

The Road Ahead: Expert Views and Future Prospects

Standing in 2025, we find ourselves at an interesting juncture. Whole Brain Emulation remains unachieved, yet the steady march of technology continues to make what once sounded like magic – mapping a brain, simulating neurons – into tangible reality on small scales. The community of researchers directly pursuing WBE is relatively small but passionate. Around them or parallel to them, larger fields (connectomics, AI, neuroscience, supercomputing) are unknowingly or indirectly building pieces of the puzzle.

Many experts assert that WBE is possible in principle, given no physical law forbids it. The remaining questions are “How difficult will it be?” and “How long will it take?” As we’ve seen, answers vary widely. On one end, visionaries like Kurzweil have bet on mid-21st century – pointing to Moore’s Law and exponential advances in scanning and AI as reasons for optimism livescience.com. They note that computing power has grown dramatically: exascale supercomputers (capable of 10^18 operations per second) are online now, and some estimates say around 10^18 ops/s is on the order of what’s needed to simulate a human brain in real time (though such comparisons are very rough) livescience.com. If trends continue, affordable hardware for brain-scale simulation might exist by the 2030s or 2040s. Moreover, supportive technologies like AI-driven image analysis are accelerating – for instance, what took nine years for the mouse connectome might, in a decade, be doable in months with better AI automation, according to scientists involvedengineering.princeton.edu.

On the other end, seasoned neuroscientists urge humility. “We barely understand the brain.” The brain is not a static circuit; it’s a living organ with complex biochemistry. Kenneth Miller’s skepticism, as mentioned, is that capturing all neural connections is necessary but maybe not sufficient – we might need to simulate molecular details inside neurons, or the way neuromodulators (like dopamine, serotonin) bathe the brain, etc., for a faithful emulation en.wikipedia.org. Each additional layer of detail multiplies the data and computing requirements by orders of magnitude. If that’s true, WBE could be centuries away with foreseeable tech. Others point out that the brain may have unknown shortcuts: maybe we don’t need every molecular detail, just the right level of abstraction. After all, the brain itself is robust – it functions slightly differently from moment to moment, proteins turnover, yet your personality remains. This gives hope that an upload might not need to be a perfect one-to-one atomistic clone, but rather a functional clone at some higher level. The question is where that level lies – at the synapse? the neuron? small networks? Ongoing neuroscience research aims to find out what aspects of neurobiology can be simplified without losing function.

There’s also an emerging viewpoint that we might achieve a form of WBE gradually through AI convergence. For example, rather than scanning a brain down to every synapse, one might develop AI that learns to mimic a particular person’s responses, eventually becoming a model so accurate it’s indistinguishable from that person. This is more akin to building a generic AI and training it to emulate a human mind from the outside (via observing behavior and conversations) – something like the AI chatbots of today taken to an extreme. Some refer to this as creating a “digital twin” of an individual through AI. It’s not pure WBE since it doesn’t use internal brain scans, and it raises its own identity questions. But it shows that the line between strict connectome-driven emulation and AI-based emulation might blur in the future. If the end result is a digital entity that talks and thinks like you, some might call that a success of mind uploading by other means (even if it didn’t involve slicing up neurons). However, purists will note that without using the actual brain’s data, it may be a superficial copy (it might lack hidden inner memories or have different conscious experience).

In recent news, the tone around WBE often emphasizes temperance. For instance, a May 2025 article by a neuroscientist in The Conversation responded to a child’s question about mind uploading by explaining that “as of today, we’re nowhere close” and that while theoretically possible, it won’t be in our lifetimes with current knowledge notebookcheck.net, holistic.news. The expert stressed how “we don’t know the level of detail at which the brain needs to be modeled for consciousness to work” holistic.news. At the same time, he acknowledged the continued interest and the fact that many “impossible” things in history eventually were achieved holistic.news. This encapsulates the current stance: cautious realism. The quest for WBE is pushing research forward, but even its advocates admit it could take a very long time. Randal Koene, a leading voice in the WBE community, often emphasizes incremental goals: improving brain preservation, advancing scanning tech, developing better neuron models, etc., so that each decade we get closer.

One interesting forecast comes from futurist and AI researcher Ben Goertzel, who speculated that if brain emulation is achieved, it might actually arrive after we’ve already created advanced AI or machine consciousness by other routes. This could mean that by the time we can upload a specific human mind, we might already have AI that can emulate human-like thought or even exceed it. If so, the landscape in which WBE emerges will be one where non-human intelligences exist too, raising even more complex dynamics (for example, an AI might help humans upload, or humans might choose to merge with AI rather than remain as pure uploads). It’s a reminder that WBE is part of a bigger picture of intelligence technology evolving.

To conclude, Whole Brain Emulation stands as one of the most ambitious projects ever conceived. It aims not just to understand the brain, but to perfectly recreate it – thereby pulling “the ghost out of the machine” and giving it new form. Achieving it would revolutionize our concepts of life, death, and self. As we’ve seen, remarkable strides are being made in relevant technologies: from the mapping of a fly’s brain in full detail smithsonianmag.com, to the preservation of a mammal’s connectome for future centuries theguardian.com, to the integration of living brains with prosthetic chips carboncopies.org. Each of these could have been a science fiction plot not long ago. Yet, the road to uploading a human mind is undoubtedly long and paved with uncertainties. It demands solving hard scientific problems and also navigating ethical minefields.

Experts advise that we use the questions raised by WBE as motivation – not to jump blindly into copying brains, but to spur deeper research into the brain and careful consideration of outcomes carboncopies.org. Whether WBE comes in 50 years or 200 years (or perhaps not at all), striving for it can yield benefits along the way: better understanding of neurodegenerative diseases, new AI algorithms, advanced prosthetic treatments for brain injuries, and insights into consciousness itself. In a sense, aiming for WBE is a grand Apollo-program of the mind – even reaching incremental milestones may transform science and society.

One day, our descendants might indeed face the choice of “to upload or not to upload.” By then, hopefully we will have the wisdom, laws, and moral frameworks to handle that choice. For now, mind uploading remains a profound possibility hovering on humanity’s horizon – a reminder of both our technological prowess and the deep philosophical mysteries of the self. As research progresses, what was once a wild sci-fi fantasy is gradually entering the realm of serious discourse. The coming decades will reveal whether whole brain emulation is an attainable destination or an asymptote we approach but never fully reach. Either way, the journey promises to deepen our understanding of the most complex object we know – the human brain – and, ultimately, ourselves.

Sources

Carboncopies Foundation – “What is Whole Brain Emulation?” (2025). An overview of WBE concepts and steps carboncopies.org.
Wikipedia – “Mind uploading.” Definition and futurist context for mind uploading en.wikipedia.org.
Smithsonian Magazine – “Scientists Unveil the First-Ever Complete Map of an Adult Fruit Fly’s Brain” (Oct 2024). Report on the fly brain connectome: ~139k neurons and 54 million synapses smithsonianmag.com.
Princeton University Engineering News – “Scientists map the half-billion connections that allow mice to see” (Apr 2025). On the MICrONS project mapping a mouse visual cortex (0.5 billion synapses) engineering.princeton.edu.
Blue Brain Project – Wikipedia page (accessed 2025). History of Blue Brain’s simulations (rat cortical column with 30k neurons in 2015) en.wikipedia.org and Henry Markram’s predictions en.wikipedia.org.
The Guardian – “Brain preservation is a step closer, but how could it ever be ‘you’?” by Susan Blackmore (Mar 2018). Discusses the pig brain preservation success and questions of identity and inequality theguardian.com.
The Guardian – “Startup wants to upload your brain to the cloud, but has to kill you to do it” by Alex Hern (Mar 2018). On Nectome and the “100% fatal” preservation process theguardian.com.
Holistic.News – “Mind Uploading to Computer: Billionaires’ Dream of Immortality” (June 2025). Summarizes Dr. Rahnev’s expert view that mind uploading is theoretically possible but likely centuries away holistic.news.
Live Science – “The Singularity Is Near: Mind Uploading by 2045?” by Tanya Lewis (June 2013). Coverage of futurists (Kurzweil, Itskov) predicting uploads by 2045 and the Global Future 2045 congress livescience.com.
Wikipedia – “Mind uploading – Ethics and Legal Issues.” Discussion of personhood rights, legal questions (inheritance, marriage, etc.) for uploads en.wikipedia.org.
Smithsonian Magazine – “We’ve Put a Worm’s Mind in a Lego Robot’s Body” by Marissa Fessenden (Nov 2014). Describes the OpenWorm project’s C. elegans simulation controlling a robot, demonstrating simple behavioral emulation smithsonianmag.com.
Anders Sandberg & Nick Bostrom (2008). “Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap.” Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford. Technical report laying out requirements and forecasting WBE development en.wikipedia.org. (Contains detailed analysis of scanning, processing, and ethical issues for WBE.)