Whole Brain Emulation Roadmap

The Future of Humanity Institute has just recently published a roadmap that describes what scientific research is required to do whole brain simulation on a computer. Here's a small quote from that paper.

Whole brain emulation, often informally called “uploading” or “downloading”, has been the subject of much science fiction and also some preliminary studies (see appendix D for history and previous work). The basic idea is to take a particular brain, scan its structure in detail, and construct a software model of it that is so faithful to the original that, when run on appropriate hardware, it will behave in essentially the same way as the original brain.

The 130 page document was created by Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg. You can download it here for free ( Whole Brain Emulation Roadmap PDF). It looks fairly interesting, but is a little technical. The paper discuses mind uploading. Mind uploading is the science fiction idea of uploading a person's consciousness into a computer via a whole brain computer simulation.

In the science fiction novel City and the Stars (1956) Arthur C. Clarke described a far future city where bodies are manufactured by the central computer, minds stored in its databanks downloaded into them, and when an inhabitant dies their mind is stored yet again in the computer, allowing countless reincarnations. Other early science fiction treatments were Roger Zelanzky’s Lord of Light (1968), Bertil Mårtensson’s Detta är verkligheten (1968) and Rudy Rucker’s Software (1979). Since then, mind emulation (“uploading”) has become a staple of much science fiction23.

The idea of mind uploading is a little improbable currently, but the paper looks fairly grounded in actual science.