Can human consciousness be transferred into the digital world?

Dmitry Itskov forecasts that by 2045, humans will have the ability to back up their consciousness to the cloud. He envisions a future where your human mind can be digitized, stored in a synthetic brain, and hosted by an artificial body.

Itskov, a Russian billionaire, media mogul, and entrepreneur, intends to achieve immortality — and he aims to bring the rest of humanity along for the ride as holograms. His initiative, called the 2045 Project, is named after the year he expects to complete the final phase of digitizing human consciousness. While mind-uploading might become a reality for future generations, the quest for eternal life is anything but new.

Looking back to the third century B.C.E., ancient Chinese culture believed mercury was the key to immortality. It's said that the first Emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, consumed high amounts of mercury in his pursuit of eternal life, only to die from mercury poisoning at the age of 39.

Fast forward to today and meet Martine Rothblatt, a telecommunications lawyer, executive, and founder of both Sirius XM satellite radio and the biotech firm United Therapeutics, who believes that death isn’t inevitable; it’s a choice. Rothblatt, a transhumanist, established the Terasem Movement and is deeply concerned about the rights of your yet-to-be-created cyber-self — your immortal avatar that will know everything you do. Think of it as an emulation of you, not just a simulation; a cyber-consciousness of your own.

Now, let’s revisit Dimitry Itskov. Before affordable and lifelike personal avatars can become a reality, the human brain's structure must be mapped, its neural connections and functions understood. We need to translate electrical signals into code, and design the necessary hardware to run, essentially, your eternal self.

Itskov’s ambitious project is divided into four stages. His plan, known as the Avatar Project, operates under the 2045 Initiative and has cost millions to develop. Avatar A, the first phase, involves creating a robot controlled by a human brain. Avatar B moves to transplant a human brain into a synthetic body. Avatar C focuses on uploading the contents of a biological brain into a synthetic one. Finally, Avatar D hinges on emulation: replacing the biological body and brain with a hologram, or another avatar, hosting a digital version of human consciousness.

Itskov has also funded efforts beyond his own project. He has supported Carboncopies.org, founded by neuroscientist Randal Koene in 2012. Back in 2007, even before the nonprofit existed, a group of like-minded transhumanism advocates, led by Koene, began pushing for the concept of digital immortality. This group started developing the idea of whole-brain emulation and outlined key challenges to overcome before the process could be realized, including mapping the brain’s structure, deciphering neural connections and functions, and building both the software and hardware to support your immortal self in the silicon of a computer chip.

In 2012, Google launched the Google Brain project, an internal research initiative focused on machine learning. (After all, machines will need to learn how to effectively be you.)

The Human Brain and Its Connectome

The Human Genome Project aimed to identify and sequence every human gene in our DNA. Similarly, the Human Microbiome Project was initiated to map all the microbes living in the human gut. Another major scientific endeavor is the Human Connectome Project, which is focused on identifying, mapping, and understanding the brain's neural pathways, helping define what makes us human.

Experts believe that the connectome is central to defining your identity. The human brain is made up of around 100 billion neurons, with each one communicating with up to 10,000 others [source: Collins]. This complex network of signals, whether occurring simultaneously or sequentially, is responsible for how the brain processes information, forms associations, and carries out tasks. It likely holds the essence of what it means to be human, including memories, talents, and the unique traits that shape your personality. All of this exists within your connectome.

Human consciousness is often likened to the ignition key of a car. The car itself is a marvel, but without the key, there’s no spark, no life. Consciousness is the way we perceive and experience both ourselves and the world around us, and it arises from the information exchanges occurring in the brain's neural network.

Several prominent theories attempt to explain what constitutes human consciousness. For instance, proponents of integrated information theory calculate the level of integrated information within a neural network, known as phi. The greater the number of connections in the network, the more information is shared. Another perspective likens human consciousness to computer memory, while the global workspace theory posits that consciousness arises when the brain gathers and distributes information across its neural network.

Whole Brain Emulation, Substrate-independent Minds and a Lego Worm Robot

It might surprise you to learn that some aspects of digitizing human consciousness are already becoming a reality, though still in their early stages. One example is the Lego worm robot.

In the emerging field of whole brain emulation, scientists have mapped the neural networks of the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans), detailing its 302 neurons and the 7,000 connections between them. This serves as a blueprint for the worm's brain [source: Collins]. By emulating the neural network and its connections, the model is encoded into a Lego robot, equipped with a sonar-sensing nose and motor neurons, replicating the worm’s biological wiring.

In theory, the same approach could be applied to the human brain on a much larger scale. With 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion connections, mapping the brain’s intricate grid could uncover key insights into human neurological, neurobehavioral, and neuropsychiatric disorders. This mapping could also play a pivotal role in advancing treatments for brain-related conditions and improving our understanding of cognition, self-awareness, and the potential for emulating the human mind [source: Collins].

Mind-uploading, or the creation of substrate-independent minds, involves transferring the contents of the human brain into a synthetic, digital form — not just your memories, but your personality and consciousness. Though still in its infancy with C. elegans, researchers aim to create a digital version of this worm, hosting its connectome as a holographic representation of its neural structure.

Then there's the Avatar Project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). This initiative blends advances in remote operations and telepresence, with the Pentagon working toward developing surrogate soldiers who can be controlled by actual soldiers from a safe distance.

In another DARPA-funded study at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, researchers successfully enabled amputees to control artificial limbs using brain implants. Similarly, in Iceland, amputees used tiny, implanted myoelectric sensors (IMES), measuring just 5 millimeters by 3 millimeters, to control their prosthetic legs by stimulating the muscles in the remaining part of their limbs [source: Pollock].

Will we achieve Itskov's vision of uploading human consciousness by 2045? Only time will reveal, but for now, we know that worms have a promising shot at digital immortality.