The Immortalist_ Uploading the Mind to a Computer - BBC News

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14 March 2016 Magazine

The immortalist: Uploading the mind to a computer

While many tech moguls dream of changing the way we live with new smart devicesor social media apps, one Russian internet millionaire is trying to change nothingless than our destiny, by making it possible to upload a human brain to a computer,reports Tristan Quinn.

"Within the next 30 years," promises Dmitry Itskov, "I am going to make sure that we canall live forever."

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It sounds preposterous, but there is no doubting the seriousness of this softly spoken 35-year-old, who says he left the business world to devote himself to something more usefulto humanity. "I'm 100% confident it will happen. Otherwise I wouldn't have started it," hesays.

It is a breathtaking ambition, but could it actually be done? Itskov doesn't have too muchtime to find out.

"If there is no immortality technology, I'll be dead in the next 35 years," he laments. Deathis inevitable - currently at least - because as we get older the cells that make up ourbodies lose their ability to repair themselves, making us vulnerable to cardiovasculardisease and other age-related conditions that kill about two-thirds of us.

So Itskov is putting a slice of his fortune in to a bold plan he has devised to bypass ageing.He wants to use cutting-edge science to unlock the secrets of the human brain and thenupload an individual's mind to a computer, freeing them from the biological constraints ofthe body.

"The ultimate goal of my plan is to transfer someone's personality into a completely new

body," he says.

Itskov's interest in making the impossible possible began as a child in the Soviet Union inthe 1980s. "My biggest dream was to be a cosmonaut, to fly in to outer space," he says.One science fiction novel made a lasting impression: "The hero took some immortality pilland he ended up flying the orbit of Earth. I remember myself questioning what I was goingto do if I'm immortal."

But does his plan to allow us all to upload our minds to computers amount to anything

more than sci-fi? The scientific director of Itskov's 2045 Initiative, Dr Randal Koene - aneuroscientist who worked as a research professor at Boston University's Center forMemory and Brain - laughs off any suggestion Itskov might have lost touch with reality.

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"All of the evidence seems to say in theory it's possible - it's extremely difficult, but it'spossible," he says. "So then you could say someone like that is visionary, but not mad because that implies you're thinking of something that's just impossible, and that's not the

case."

The theoretical possibility Randal refers to is rooted in questions about how our brainswork that neuroscience has yet to answer. Our brains are made up of about 86 billionneurons, connected cells that send information to each other by firing electrical chargesthat propagate through this organ in our skulls like waves.

But exactly how the brain generates our mind is a mystery like no other in science,according to the neurobiologist Prof Rafael Yuste of Columbia University. "The challenge

is precisely how to go from a physical substrate of cells that are connected inside thisorgan, to our mental world, our thoughts, our memories, our feelings," he says.

Find out more


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Horizon: The Immortalist, produced and directed by Tristan Quinn, will be shown on BBC2 at 20:00 on Wednesday 16 March 2016 - viewers in the UK can catch up later on theBBC iPlayer

To try to unlock its workings, many neuroscientists approach the brain as if it were acomputer. In this analogy the brain turns inputs, sensory data, into outputs, our behaviour,through computations. This is where the theoretical argument for mind uploading starts. Ifthis process could be mapped, the brain could perhaps be copied in a computer, alongwith the individual mind it gives rise to.

That's the view of Dr Ken Hayworth, a neuroscientist who maps slivers of mouse brain at

the Janelia Research Campus in Virginia by day, and by night grapples with the problemof how to upload his mind. Ken believes mapping the connectome - the complexconnections of all the neurons in a brain - holds the key, because he believes it encodesall the information that makes us who we are, though this is not proven. "In the samesense that my computer is really just the ones and zeros on my hard drive, and I don'tcare what happens as long as those ones and zeros make it to the next computer it shouldbe the same thing with me," he says, "I don't care if my connectome is implemented in thisphysical body or a computer simulation controlling a robotic body."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0747199


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But Ken is a realist. "We are pitifully far away from mapping a human connectome," heacknowledges. "To put it in perspective, to image a whole fly brain it is going to take usapproximately one to two years. The idea of mapping a whole human brain with the

existing technology that we have today is simply impossible." And there's anothertheoretical challenge. Even if we could create the wiring diagram of a human brain, minduploading would also most likely require reading the constant activity of all its neurons too.

Here Itskov might get some unexpected help, according to Yuste - who helped bring aboutthe world's biggest neuroscience research project, the Brain Initiative. As part of this $6bnAmerican programme aimed at solving the mysteries of brain disorders like Alzheimer's,he is hoping to map the continual interaction of neurons - the patterns of firing - in thebrain over time, "We want to measure every spike from all the neurons at oncesimultaneously. Many people said it's just impossible."

It is an approach that does not rely on mapping the connectome first. In research yet to bepublished, Yuste has for the first time imaged over time the hypnotic electrical flashes thatmake up the activity of nearly all the neurons - up to several thousand - in one of thesimplest nervous systems in evolution, a tiny invertebrate called a hydra. "It was veryexciting," he says. But "today we just cannot tell you what these patterns mean. So it's abit like listening in on a conversation in a foreign language that you don't understand."


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Within 15 years Yuste hopes to map - and interpret - the activity of all the neurons in amouse cortex. But the ultimate aim is to read the activity of the human brain.

"If the brain were a digital computer, if you wanted to upload the mind you need to be ableto decipher it or download it first. So I think the Brain Initiative is a step that is necessaryfor this uploading to happen."

But Itskov is far from home and dry. At Duke University, one leading neuroscientist arguesthat the brain's dynamic complexity - from which the human condition emerges - cannot bereplicated. "You cannot code intuition; you cannot code aesthetic beauty; you cannot codelove or hate," says Dr Miguel Nicolelis, who is developing a mind-controlled exoskeletonaimed at helping the paralysed walk. "There is no way you will ever see a human brain

reduced to a digital medium. It's simply impossible to reduce that complexity to the kind ofalgorithmic process that you will have to have to do that."

Yuste is also very far from certain the brain works like a computer and could ever becopied in a machine. But because neuroscience cannot yet explain how exactly the braingives rise to us and prove that mind uploading is impossible, he believes society shouldstart considering what the consequences might be if Itskov succeeded in his ambition.

"The pathway that leads with the new neural technologies to our understanding of the

brain is the same pathway that could lead, theoretically, to the possibility of minduploading," says Yuste. "Scientists that are involved in these methods have theresponsibility to think ahead."


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Mind uploading would usher in a world fraught with risks.

"If you could replicate the mind and upload it into a different material, you can in principleclone minds," says Yuste. "These are complicated issues because they deal with the coreof defining what is a person."

Itskov is more sanguine: "I will answer you to the question of ethics by the opinion which

was given to me by his holiness the Dalai Llama when I visited him in 2013. His point wasthat you can do everything if your motivation is to help people."

But this assurance is not enough for Yuste, who sits on the Brain Initiative's ethics panel:"I would put mind uploading in the list of the topics that should be very carefully discussedand thought through."

Itskov is already planning his endless life. "For the next few centuries I envision havingmultiple bodies, one somewhere in space, another hologram-like, my consciousness just

moving from one to another."

It is estimated that 107 billion people have died before us. As our understanding of thebrain advances in the decades ahead it will become clear whether Itskov is really themomentous visionary he claims to be, or merely the latest dreamer of impossible dreams.

Tristan Quinn produced and directed Horizon: The Immortalist , which will be shown on BBC 2 Wednesday at 20:00 on 16 March 2016 - viewers in the UK can catch up later onthe BBC iPlayer

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