Mind Emulation Foundation

What is mind emulation?

While we are far from understanding how the mind works, most philosophers and scientists agree that your mind is an emergent property of your body. In particular, your body’s connectome. Your connectome is the comprehensive network of neural connections in your brain and nervous system. Today your connectome is biological.

What is connectomics?

Connectomics is a subfield of neuroscience focused on studying connectomes, the comprehensive network of neural connections in the brain and nervous system.

How would you emulate a mind?

One way to emulate a mind is to map the entire connectome. It is estimated that there are approximately 100 trillion connections in a human brain. All of these connections fit into a volume of approximately 1,000 cm³. In order to scan all of these connections you would need close to a nanometer resolution.

What is the destructive approach?

Destructive scanning of the connectome has several steps: preservation, storage, scanning, and emulation. Upon biological death, the body undergoes aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation. This process uses glutaraldehyde to stabilize the brain’s structure and vitrification to preserve the body so it can be stored at −135 °C indefinitely.

What is the non-destructive approach?

Non-destructive scanning of the connectome is similar to destructive scanning but instead the scanning is done in a living being. The best known approach to this problem is magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The highest resolution commercially available MRI machines are only sub-millimeter which is tens of thousands of times worse than the nanometer resolution necessary.