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We exist in an endless universe only bound by the laws of physics and yet our consciousness is trapped in mortal machines made of meat with the breathtaking explosion of animation and technology. The concept of leaving our body behind and uploading our mind into a digital utopia seems possible even like our logical next step of our evolutionary ladder. Upload what exactly? Mind is one of those words that are really hard to define. It’s thought to be the collective ability of our consciousness and intelligence. The thing that lets you imagine, recognize and dream. Mind uploading is the hypothetical concept of making a copy of this and transferring it into a computer to run a stimulation of your consciousness but even the practice gets really hard really fast.

The possibility of mind uploading is based on 3 assumptions. Assumption one, the mind is in your brain structure and arrangement and bio chemicals, the idea that everything about the mind can be found in the brain is called physicalism and it keeps our discussion within the remainder of natural laws. Assumption two is at some point we will understand the brain well enough and possess the technology to stimulate all of it. Assumption three, computer software can host your mind which means the mind is computable. There is no physical property in the brain including consciousness that can not be stimulated currently even if it requires a lot of code. Around 100 billion neurons are communicated via 1 million and billion connections that are sending signals up to 100 times each second. Which is 1 quadrillion events every second of your waking life. It’s not just neurons, there are also other billions of supporting and immune cells of various types performing different functions. The most developed, can be argued as one of the more important parts of the brain is called the neocortex which holds the memories, our abilities to plan, think, dream and imagine. The area of the precuneus cortex has the greatest influence on our consciousness, but also other areas can network together to perform various different tasks.

To get this worldly interconnected mess of cells into a computer, we have to be able to come up with an advanced scanning technology which is unfortunately unattainable at this point in our evolution. Many theoretical methods of uploading your consciousness have been proposed throughout the years, many concepts have been close to impossible to perform, however, there is one method that seems very promising. Cutting a brain into tiny slices and scanning them with a high resolution electron microscope to create an accurate image of all the cells and connections. In 2019, scientists successfully mapped a cubic millimeter of a mouse’s brain roughly the size of a big grain of sand. This grain of the brain was cut into 25,000 slices. 5 electron microscopes ran continuously for 5 months collecting more than 100 million images. It took 3 months to assemble the images into a 3D model. The completed data set fills up 2 million gigabytes of cloud storage. To put that into perspective, to scan a whole human brain, scientists would have to repeat this method a million times, which will fill up 2 million petabytes.