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Uploading Our Brains. Reality Check.
It’s a long running trope of silence-fiction stories in various formats. Just before we die our brain gets uploaded to a hard drive. Voila! Immortality. Perhaps it’s downloaded to a newly grown body or we just zip around networks, giddy ones and zeroes, hither and thither. The technology is moving there.
Some will outright object, others think it super cool and some will just be skeptical. Uploading our brains comes with a whole host of questions and issues. Morality, ethics, existence of the soul, religiopus beliefs, cultural norms.
Humans are inextricably bound to technology. We cannot survive, let alone evolve as a species without it. Even on earth, nature is hostile for humans. We can only live in a very narrow band between water, land and sky.
There is a select group of people known as post-humanists. One of their ideas is that uploading our brains to a digital world is the only way that humanity can survive and progress. They have the notion that human thought, consciousness, intelligence, can be reduced to simple algorithms. This is evolution on a diet.
Some, like Elon Musk, are taking a step in this direction by creating brain implants so humans and Artificial Intelligence can work together. His company is called Neuralink. It is not without its controversies. Par for the course for Mr. Musk.
Can We Even Upload Our Brains?
For the post-humanists, this is an unequivocal yes. But it may not actually be achievable. Yet working on this sort of challenge could lead to some significant benefits such as treatments for dementia, depression and other brain-related diseases, perhaps even treating comas.
We’ve long held this idea that our brains are a thing on its own, that the rest of our body is simply a container. After all, we can lose a limb, become paralyzed from the neck down or in various ways, transplant organs easily.
Evolving research however, suggests that yes, we may be able to do these things, but the brain and the rest of the body may be more deeply interconnected than we thought. Such as what we’re learning about the brain-gut connection. Some scientists call our gut the second brain.
