Last December, on New Year’s Eve, I got a phone call in the middle of the night. “It’s your grandmother,” my mom said, “she’s in the ICU.” My grandma has been battling Parkinson’s Disease (PD) for more than eight years. Last summer was the first time I had seen her in five years. Throughout our time apart, her powerful voice in our phone calls had painted an illusion of her old self in my head, and I was not prepared for the reality of her physical deterioration. As I sprinted towards the subway station, cold air scraping against my face like blades, I felt my rose-tinted mirage disintegrate with each passing exhalation.

“Her head is crystal clear,” a nurse told me the next morning, after my grandma’s condition had stabilized. “Sometimes she can't speak because of her tremors, but her mind is always acute.” I imagined how suffocating it must have been for my grandma, a natural conversationalist forced into silence. Currently, there is no cure for PD; in fact, for all neurodegenerative diseases, the gradual decay of neurons translates into physical and psychological symptoms that are hard to address. But what if we can preserve someone’s mind and transport that into a new body, freeing them from neural damage? If this becomes a possibility, it would alleviate the sufferings endured by millions. For this reason, I am driven to research whole brain emulation, henceforth referred to as mind uploading, and whether someone’s mind upload would be a valid instantiation of the original person.

According to the Encyclopedia of Science and Religion, mind uploading is “the belief that human beings can transmigrate into machine bodies” (Geraci). This definition is vague, but it illustrates what we want to achieve via mind uploading – to preserve a copy of a human mind and download it onto various artificial bodies, like computers and androids. In 2005, IBM and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology launched the Blue Brain Project, an effort to develop “all the biological algorithms, scientific processes and software needed to digitally reconstruct and simulate the brain” (Blue Brain Project), starting with mice brains. In 2013, the European Union launched the Human Brain Project, a large-scale research effort seeking to emulate the human brain. This project has made significant breakthroughs, including developing digital reconstructions of certain ...

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