Whole Brain Emulation

Whole brain emulation (WBE), also called mind uploading, is the hypothesized process of scanning a brain's physical structure and using that data to build a computational model that reproduces the original brain's function, and potentially its subjective experience, on different hardware. Hans Moravec sketched the idea in 1988. Anders Sandberg and Nick Bostrom turned it into an engineering roadmap in 2008 (Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap, Future of Humanity Institute), splitting the problem into three phases: scanning brain tissue at sufficient resolution, mapping its wiring (connectomics), and running a computational model of that structure with enough fidelity to reproduce behavior (computational neuroscience).

Progress since then has concentrated in small nervous systems. Complete synaptic-resolution connectomes now exist for C. elegans and the adult fruit fly Drosophila (about 139,000 neurons, FlyWire, 2024). In March 2026, Eon Systems combined the fly connectome with a physics-simulated body to run what it describes as the first embodied whole-brain emulation, producing walking, feeding, and grooming behavior from the neural model alone, without reinforcement learning or task-specific training. The State of Brain Emulation Report 2025 estimates a full mouse connectome, roughly 500 times more neurons than a fly's, is a decade or more away. Human-scale emulation is further still.

Proponents frame WBE as a possible route to digital immortality or to running emulated minds faster than biological ones. Critics note that reconstructing synaptic wiring alone leaves open whether the result would be conscious or preserve identity, since neuromodulatory state, biochemistry, and embodiment may matter as much as connectivity. The concept remains a reference point in AI safety and transhumanist discussion rather than a near-term technology.