If you ask me what my super long-term life goal / interest / objecetive function is, it will be that "I want to work on brain upload technology". I've been incessantly harassing people as to why I think it should be a thing / my motivation for it, and I thought i would write a blog post about it. Think of it as a manifesto of sorts, and hopefully it won't be used against me in the future (unabomber as meme)

How do you even define an uploaded brain / mind anyways?

I think I spam the word "brain upload" a lot, but a more concrete definition would be mind upload. To be even more exact, I define a human being to be "uploaded" if there is an embodied model that:

(1) passes the Garland test by most of his loved ones, i.e. even if you tell them that this is an AI simulation of the person, not the real person, they cannot help but think that this is as real as the real person.

(2) the trajectory of the uploaded / simulated mind is within the possible space of trajectory space of the real person, i.e. it would learn / act / react the same way as the source person, for an extended period of time.

If you've watched Pantheon, a mental model is the Uploaded Intelligence (UI) in the show. For those who haven't watched it, TLDR humanity all now live on the cloud as AI agents that occasionally zoom down to robots in the physical realm, but otherwise they all just hang out in the virtual space and continue to live as digital entities.

This might sound super cooked, and I acknowledge that it is a bit on the left field, but it is a shared vision by a large group of others including Jensen Huang (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vif8NQcjVf0&t=8570)

if it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck, who cares if the duck is made out of meat or GPUs?
if it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck, who cares if the duck is made out of meat or GPUs?

So why brain upload?

This is primarily a personal motivation, not necessarily true, and in general up for debate. To sum it up in a few sentences, it's that

There is an ongoing debate within philosophy / cognitive science / neuroscience / machine learning etc., on what consciousness is. Personally, I take a mostly computational functionalist viewpoint, i.e. the mind is an emergent object inside a brain inside a body. So a software / hardware paradigm, and I think humanity is due for a hardware upgrade.

In my past life as a medical doctor, one thing I constantly wonder is, what exactly are we "saving"? To what point are we "curing" diseases, and at what point are we going against nature? What is the ultimate goal of medicine? What exactly are we trying to preserve? If we do a ship of Theseus kind of thing, but with synthetic organs, at what point does a human cease to be human? What about a brain of Theseus, with a gradual replacement of synthetic neurons?

Personally, I do reckon if we go full cyborg replacement, as long as the entity still recognises it as itself, then it still counts. In that case, why don't we just straight up create a copy and upload it?

On a side note, I think all the talk about "the beauty of life lies in its impermanence" does not go against this. Even if you upload a brain to the cloud, random bit flips will still happen. Mind decay will still happen. There are tonnes of sci-fi written about how a digital mind still faces its own mortality. e.g. in Hyperion Cantos, one of the AI had a beautiful monologue about how the loss of a few minutes of data lead to an immense sense of grief. Not to mention even if you live as an AI agent, it doesn't mean that things are static. The world is still dynamic, and there will still be events that one could miss, and "life" as we know it as digital entities would still be impermanent.

And if you say "oh but mortality is what makes the human condition beautiful", I personally think that's cope. See this parable from CGP Grey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY

The human condition should be preserved

During my teenage years I came across the word sonder. It's one of those made up words, that describes "the profound awareness that every passerby is the main character of their own story, possessing their own complex set of feelings, worries, and inner worlds."

Maybe it's because of my nature as a hoarder, but I genuinely think it is a waste that the 8.3 billion minds right now, each with their story, their joy and interests, their sorrows and regrets, will one day be forgotten and lost in the ether. I am not saying we have to forcibly upload everybody, but I think in the face of the end of one's biological existence, one should be given the choice to continue to live on beyond the carbon substrate

What's the meaning of life but propagation of information anyways?

Another way to think about it, is "what is our biological drive"? Again, this is personal, but throughout evolution the whole point of it all is to propagate genetic information, therefore the (inherent) meaning of life is to do that. We are literally just meat puppets hosting genetic information designed to feed and fuck so we can spread our seed.

Any other higher order meaning to our existence, in my opinion, are just stories we tell ourselves to post-hoc explain why we are here, and along the way we built tribes, myths, religion, and civilization. That is kind of nice, but in the end the main thing about life is to preserve information. In which case, I think brain upload falls into that bucket

An uploaded brain is not a legacy

"So you just want to leave a legacy" - That's one of the more common responses I get when I tell people I want to work on brain upload. I think there is a huge distinction between the two. Primarily, a legacy is static. A memorabilia for most. However, an uploaded brain literally identifies as the person. It is agentic (god I hate that word), capable of learning, growing, interacting with others, and continue to exist. Maybe one day this uploaded entity might even drift so much that it no longer becomes recognisable compared to the original, but nonetheless it is within the possible trajectory space of how the original might end up.

Continuity of the mind is an illusion, and the mind is brittle

Another argument I have with others is that "oh but you are not uploading, you are just prestiging". To that, I argue that continuity of consciousness is itself an illusion. It's one of those things that has been argued to death in the realm of philosophy. My best mental model is from this game called Soma (Spoilers Ahead) At the end of the game, the main character was promised to be transported to some digital heaven, but instead it was actually a copy and upload scenario. We, as the players, were then shown two versions - the one that got left behind and the one that got to be "uploaded". The former ended up in abject horror, while the latter lived in blissful ignorance, with the illusion of continuity.

Medically, where consciousness goes is during anaesthesia is also one of those ongoing academic debates, but it is mostly accepted* that it is a discontinuous process, i.e. a fresh reboot of hardware, which occasionally leads to buggy software, such as delirium or personality changes (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301008216301137), dissociative identity (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301008216301137), or even long-term issues with identity and memory up to two months (https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2013.12121632). All these suggest that establishing a coherent mind is a fiddly process where continuity is only post-hoc, and overall brittle and unstable.

With that in mind, it is probably worth wondering also whether an uploaded mind with sufficient fidelity is even possible, or if we run into fundamental limitations such as the embodied mind, in which case we might need to simulate not just the mind / brain, but also the whole body including its gut microbiome and all the other small niggly stuff. That is an open question, but it's worth exploring.

So now what?

To be honest, nothing much. I think the tech is not there yet. I think before it becomes an engineering problem, it is first and foremost a cultural problem, that most people don't think similar to the above. The majority of humanity still believes there is a god, and amongst the tech crowd, I wonder what the split looks like re willingness re brain upload (which is why I am doing a vote at ICML, and why you might be reading this now).

Personally, I am not doing much either. As of now my PhD project is just on agents (ew), but I am thinking about this problem a lot, and would gladly discuss / argue about this anytime.

Lastly, I don't track visitor count to my personal site or anything. If you find what I wrote above remotely interesting, I would appreciate a follow @chychiu (or feel free to DM me there to tell me why I am wrong)