The time is now: As a species and as individuals we need whole brain emulation
Urgent need arises from precarious conditions of humanity and individuals alike. On the global scale, the specter of extinction always looms over a species that depends utterly on one finely tuned set of environmental constraints: Temperature, pressure, breathable air, water and fauna for the nutrition of the body that provides the functional substrate to which our thoughts are tied. And on social, familiar and individual scales great suffering strikes in the form of incapacity, decrepitude and death. To solve these problems is a moral obligation.
Seeking to cure aging falls short of the needs if it does not ameliorate our most severe fragility: environment and resource dependency, intellectual limitation and individual mortality through traumatic incident or disease. We must free the mind from its single fragile substrate, make it possible to transfer the mind out of the brain.
There is a model for success, since we already know one system that works. Needless to say, that is the biological brain. Whole brain emulation is a credible technique for mind transfer. This term that I first proposed and its specific approach refer to creating large-scale high-resolution representations and emulations of the activity in neuronal circuitry as required in patient-specific neuroprostheses.
Essential components of whole brain emulation are rapidly becoming the standard fare of neuroinformatics and related mainstream pursuits, including the quantitative tools for neuroscientists, neuroengineers and clinicians that my lab envisions in the form of a Virtual Brain Laboratory.
This bottom-up piece-wise development is the basic condition of science without directed project management. Now is the time to implement an objective-oriented program to integrate these developments and achieve mind transfer. When accomplished our species and ourselves will become more competitive and prepared for the advent of technologies and other intelligence.
Biographies: Randal Koene
"Competition is an inescapable occurrence in the animate and even in the inanimate universe. To give our minds the flexibility to transfer and to operate in different substrates bestows upon our species the most important competitive advantage."
Randal A. Koene, Ph.D., is Director of the Department of Neuroengineering at Tecnalia, third largest private research organization in Europe. He is a former Prof. at the Center for Memory and Brain of Boston University, and co-founder/owner of the Neural Engineering Corporation of Massachusetts. His research objective is whole brain emulation, creating the large-scale high-resolution representations and emulations of activity in neuronal circuitry that are needed in patient-specific neuroprostheses.
Koene has professional expertise in computational neuroscience, psychology, information theory, electrical engineering and physics. He organizes neural engineering efforts to obtain and replicate function and structure information that resides in the neural substrate for use in neuroprostheses and neural interfaces. And based on NETMORPH (netmorph.org), Koene's computational framework for the simulated morphological development of neuronal circuitry, his lab is creating a Virtual Brain Laboratory to give neuroscientists, neuroengineers and clinicians large-scale high-resolution quantitative tools analogous to the computational tools that have become essential in fields such as genetics, chemistry or the aero-space industry. This effort bridges scales and will help determine how significant functions are encoded robustly in neural ensembles, and how those functions can nevertheless depend in specific ways on the detailed biophysics of particular component physiology.
Koene earned his Ph.D. in Computational Neuroscience at the Department of Psychology at McGill University, and his M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering with a specialization in Information Theory at Delft University of Technology. He is a member of the Oxford working group that convened in 2007 to create a first roadmap toward whole brain emulation (a descriptive term for the technological accomplishment of mind transfer to a different substrate that was first coined by Koene on his MindUploading.org website).
Visit Koene's web site MindUploading.org or watch Koene present and discuss "Scope and Resolution in Neural Prosthetics and Special Concerns for Emulation of a Whole Brain"
