Part 1 - The Brain

The desire to be free from the limits of the human experience is as old as our first stories 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 innovation and progress for the first time the concept of leaving our flesh piles behind and uploading our minds into a digital utopia seems possible, even like the logical next step on our evolutionary ladder. Mind uploading and digital immortality are some of the core themes of the game cyberpunk 2077 it plays in a grim dystopian future where humanity has progressed far beyond today's technology and explores what this could mean for humanity.

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Mind uploading is very complicated. Upload, what exactly? Mind is one of those words that are really hard to define it's thought to be the collective abilities of your consciousness and intelligence. The thing that lets you imagine recognize and dream. Mind uploading is the hypothetical concept of making a copy of this inner world and transferring it into a computer to run a simulation of your consciousness but even defining the premise gets really hard really fast.

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The possibility of mind uploading is based on three assumptions.

Assumption No. 1
Your mind is in your brain's structure arrangement and biochemistry the idea that everything about the mind can be found in the brain is called physicalism and it keeps our discussion within the domain of natural law.

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Assumption No. 2
At some point we will understand the brain well enough and possess the technology to simulate all of its aspects to make a digital mind copy

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Assumption No. 3
Computer software can host your mind which means the mind is computable there is no physical property in the brain including consciousness that cannot be simulated accurately. Even if it requires a lot of code all of these assumptions have been proposed and challenged by scientists and philosophers and they remain the subject of passionate debate with so many fundamental questions still unanswered.

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It's hard to discuss the topic without annoying someone but whatever your position every discussion of mind upload has to begin with the brain. The brain is the most complex biological structure known and around 100 billion neurons are communicating via one million billion connections that are sending signals up to one thousand times each second which is one quadrillion events every second of your waking life. It's not just neurons. There are billions of supporting and immune cells of various types performing different jobs on a macro level the brain can be divided into sections with different roles from breathing and heart rate to coordinating movement and involuntary reflexes.

The most developed parts the neocortex or the outermost layer of the brain hold memories. Our ability to plan think and imagine, and hope and dream. Where exactly the you part of the brain is situated is not entirely clear.

We know that areas like the prefrontal cortex have the greatest influence on our consciousness but also that several areas can network together to share tasks none of them can do alone. The brain's building blocks are not exactly simple either neurons are not just wires, they alter and process information synapses where signals are handed over from one neuron to the next, contain receptors for hundreds of chemical signals opening them up to outside influence. We have a basic understanding of how these work and we can accurately predict their behavior at small scales but there's a lot more to the brain than just nerve signals hormones play a huge role like serotonin which affects our mood or histamine which helps us learn the brain is influenced by our other parts too from heart nerves to gut bacteria what seemed like a very complicated.

End of part 1

This is a four part article about how we can become immortal. Succeeding parts will follow soon.

-neonihilist