Implanting a computer chip into the brain

Richard Jones, University of Sheffield


Perhaps the most dramatic way transhumanists believe that technology will transform the human condition is the idea that someone's mind could be converted into digital data and "uploaded" into an immensely powerful computer. This would allow you to live in a world of unbounded virtual experiences and effectively achieve immortality (as long as someone remembers to do the backups and doesn't switch you off).

Yet transhumanists seem to ignore the fact that this kind of mind-uploading has some insurmountable obstacles. The practical difficulties mean it couldn't happen in the foreseeable future, but there are also some more fundamental problems with the whole concept.


It's a short step from the idea that our minds could be uploaded, to the notion that they already have been and that we are already living in a Matrix-style computer simulation. Technology entrepreneur Elon Musk recently revived this discussion by arguing the chance that we are not living in a computer simulation was only "one in billions". Of course, this is just a technological revival of the idea that reality is an illusion, which has been discussed by philosophers and mystics for hundreds of years.


More than molecules

Yet even if we could create such a "wiring diagram" for a living brain, that wouldn't be enough to understand how it operates. For that we'd need to quantify exactly how the neurons interact at each of the junctions, and that's a matter of molecular-level detail. We don't even know how many molecules are in the brain, let alone how many are vital for its functions, but whatever the answer it's too many to replicate with a computer.


brain neurons neuroscience

To understand the operations of a man-made computer, we don't need to keep track of the currents and voltages in every component, much less understand what every electron is doing. We've designed the switching operations of the transistors so there's an unambiguous mapping from the state of the circuits to the simple digital logic of ones and zeros. But no-one designed a brain – it evolved – so there is no reason to expect any simple mapping of its operations to digital logic.

Dangerous idea



Yet this distorts our scientific priorities and gets in the way of us making sensible choices about developing the technologies we need to solve our very real current problems. Brain uploading is a great premise for speculative fiction, but it's not a good basis for talking about the future.

Richard Jones, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation, University of Sheffield
