back to main page

Mind uploading

English Русский Lietuvių
Immortality is eternal life, the ability to live forever.
Mind-to-computer uploading
Whole brain emulation (WBE), mind upload or brain upload (sometimes called "mind copying" or "mind transfer") is the hypothetical process of scanning mental state (including long-term memory and "self") of a particular brain substrate and copying it to a computer. The computer could then run a simulation model of the brain's information processing, such that it responds in essentially the same way as the original brain (i.e., indistinguishable from the brain for all relevant purposes) and experiences having a conscious mind.
The problem of immortality
Though, in theory, an uploaded, or copied version of an individual's brain would have the same memory and personality, the use of this process for eternal life (see Immortality) is in theory impossible for the simple reason that one would not be prolonging one's life, but simply creating another with the same experience. The creator, or original would feel no difference, and would still die of natural cause. In fact, the idea of mind uploading is likeable to cloning, and in the same way as a clone, the "copied" mind would not be the same as the origin, just a copy.
Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, claims to know and foresee that people will be able to "upload" their entire brains to computers and become "digitally immortal" by 2045. Kurzweil made this claim for many years, e.g. during his speech in 2013 at the Global Futures 2045 International Congress in New York, which claims to subscribe to a similar set of beliefs. Mind uploading is also advocated by a number of researchers in neuroscience and artificial intelligence, such as Marvin Minsky while he was still alive. In 1993, Joe Strout created a small web site called the Mind Uploading Home Page, and began advocating the idea in cryonics circles and elsewhere on the net. That site has not been actively updated in recent years, but it has spawned other sites including, run by Randal A. Koene, who also moderates a mailing list on the topic. These advocates see mind uploading as a medical procedure which could eventually save countless lives.
Michio Kaku, in collaboration with Science, hosted a documentary, Sci Fi Science: Physics of the Impossible, based on his book Physics of the Impossible. Episode four, titled "How to Teleport", mentions that mind uploading via techniques such as quantum entanglement and whole brain emulation using an advanced MRI machine may enable people to be transported to vast distances at near light-speed.

Kenneth D. Miller, a professor of neuroscience at Columbia and a co-director of the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, raised doubts about the practicality of mind uploading. His major argument is that reconstructing neurons and their connections is in itself is a formidable task, but it is far from being sufficient. Operation of brain depends on the dynamics of electrical and biochemical signal exchange between neurons. Therefore capturing them in a single "frozen" state may prove insufficient. In addition, the nature of these signals may require modeling down to molecular level and beyond. Therefore, while not rejecting the idea in principle, Miller believes that the complexity of the "absolute" duplication of an individual mind is insurmountable for the nearest hundreds of years.
An exocortex is a hypothetical artificial external information processing system that would augment a brain's biological high-level cognitive processes.
An individual's exocortex would be composed of external memory modules, processors, IO devices and software systems that would interact with, and augment, a person's biological brain. Typically this interaction is described as being conducted through a direct brain–computer interface, making these extensions functionally part of the individual's mind.
Individuals with significant exocortices could be classified as cyborgs or posthumans.

The noun exocortex is composed of the Greek-derived prefix exo-, meaning external or outside, and the Latin noun cortex, which originally meant bark but is used in neuroscience for the outer bark-like layer of the brain that is the site of most sophisticated cognitive information processing. It was coined in allusion to the neocortex (literally 'new bark'), the newest part of the mammalian brain (in evolutionary history), believed to be responsible for the highest human cognitive abilities including conscious thought, spatial reasoning, and sensory perception. Thus the terminology suggests a progression from reptilian thought (the older parts of the brain) through human (neocortex) to high-level human or even supra-human cognitive processing capabilities (exocortex).

Intellectual background
The concept of an exocortex has intellectual roots both in the fields of computer science and evolutionary psychology.

Computer science roots
Within computer science, the seeds were planted by the DARPA associated researcher J.C.R. Licklider. Within his speculative 1960 paper Man-Computer Symbiosis, Licklider outlined his vision that humans and the new technology of computers, if tightly-coupled together, would prove to complement each other's strengths to such a degree that many of the pure artificial intelligence systems envisioned at the time by optimistic researchers would prove unnecessary:

— Man-Computer Symbiosis, J.C.R. Licklider, March 1960.

From this basis, the concept of an exocortex, the direct coupling of the human mind with computers to leverage their respective complementary strengths, can be viewed as a result of the ever increasing symbiotic coupling between human and computers.

Psychology roots
The exocortex concept also has roots in evolutionary psychology as a result of Merlin Donald of Queen's University. Donald, in the 1990 book Origins of the Modern Mind as well as later papers, proposed an evolutionary model of the mind, from a functionary perspective, from its origins in prehistoric apes to the modern human being. Donald focuses significant attention on the use that modern humans make of external symbolic storage and manipulation systems—the range of technologies from cuneiforms, hieroglyphics, and ideograms to alphabetic languages, mathematics and now computers. From Donald's perspective, these external symbolic systems have allowed for the functional reorganization of the human mind in how it deals with the world.

— Precis of Origins of the Modern Mind, Merlin Donald, 1996.

Current applicability
Cognitive science origin
In November 1998 the specific term exocortex was coined by researcher Ben Houston. Houston coined the term to refer concisely to tightly-coupled cognition-level brain-computer interface technologies in the spirit of J. C. R. Licklider's original vision.

exocortex (eks'o kor'teks) n. Latin -- an organ that resides outside of the brain that aids in high level thinking. .... This will not be a prominent term until prefrontal cortex neural implants become widespread. (emphasis in original)
— early exocortex definition, Ben Houston, May 2000

Use in science fiction
Speculative devices which fit the definition of exocortices were described in hard science fiction long before the term was coined; examples appear in Neuromancer by William Gibson and in The Peace War by Vernor Vinge, both published in 1984. More recently Vinge, in A Fire Upon the Deep and several short stories, described the functional effects of what are essentially several kinds of exocortices – both those composed of computational elements, and those enabled by high-bandwidth communication between groups of beings. Peter F. Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy also describes in detail similar technological beings.

Charles Stross, the Hugo Award-nominated hard science fiction writer, has led the adoption of the term exocortex within science fiction circles. Beginning in 2004, Stross made use of the term in Elector, a short story published in the September issue of Asimov's Science Fiction. Stross made more extensive uses of the term exocortex and its derivatives in Accelerando, his 2005 novel. While Stross himself does not provide an explicit definition of the term, a few passages indicate his meaning:

About ten billion humans are alive in the solar system, each mind surrounded by an exocortex of distributed agents, threads of personality spun right out of their heads to run on the clouds of utility fog – infinitely flexible computing resources as thin as aerogel – in which they live. (emphasis added)
— Accelerando, Charles Stross, 2005.

Sometimes he isn't certain he's still human; too many threads of his consciousness seem to live outside his head, reporting back whenever they find something interesting. .... And it's too early for anyone out there to be trying to hack exocortices... isn't it? Right now, the external threads of his consciousness are telling him that they like Annette.... (emphasis added)
— Accelerando, Charles Stross, 2005.

The Wikibooks Accelerando Technical Companion provides this explanation:
An EXOcortex can best be described as the portion of a trans- or posthuman entity's brain (or cortex) which exists outside of that entity's primary computing structure, usually the brain inhabiting a person's 'meatbody.' For example, a person's exocortex could very well be composed of all the external memory modules, processor, and devices that the person's biological brain interacts with on a realtime basis, thereby in effect making those external devices a functional part of the individual's 'mind.' (emphasis in original)
— Accelerando Technical Companion, Wikibooks.

Popular usage
While initial recognition of the exocortex concept was nonexistent, this has changed as a result of Charles Stross's recent publications and the growing awareness of brain-computer interfacing. The term and concept of an exocortex has both been applied and noted as a novel interesting word by various writers. James Hughen wrote in an essay titled "What comes after Homo sapiens?" that appeared in New Scientist:
To remain the web’s weavers and not its ensnared victims, we must merge with our electronic exocortex, wiring greater memory, thought processing and communication abilities directly into our brains.
The Extended Mind


They bring up the recurrent theme of the role of language:


Jump up ^ Andy Clark, David J Chalmers (January 1998). "The extended mind". Analysis. 58 (1): 7–19. doi:10.1093/analys/58.1.7.; reprinted as: Andy Clark, David J Chalmers (2010). "Chapter 2: The extended mind". In Richard Menary, ed. The Extended Mind. MIT Press. pp. 27–42. ISBN 9780262014038.; and available on line as: Andy Clark, David J Chalmers. "The extended mind". Cogprints.
Computational theory of mind
In philosophy, a computational theory of mind names a view that the human mind or the human brain (or both) is an information processing system and that thinking is a form of computing. The theory was proposed in its modern form by Hilary Putnam in 1961, and developed by the MIT philosopher and cognitive scientist Jerry Fodor (who was Putnam's PhD student) in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Despite being vigorously disputed in analytic philosophy in the 1990s (due to work by Putnam himself, John Searle, and others), the view is common in modern cognitive psychology and is presumed by many theorists of evolutionary psychology; in the 2000s and 2010s the view has resurfaced in analytic philosophy (Scheutz 2003, Edelman 2008).

Ray Kurzweil - How are Brains Conscious?
Length: 12 minutes