So-Called "Brain Computer Interfaces" Do Nothing to Show That Mind Uploading Is Possible

The concept of "mind uploading" is the entirely fallacious notion that a human might achieve a radically different form of existence by some process in which his mind and memories are transferred into a computer or robot. The concept is completely erroneous because your brain is not the source of your mind, and the brain is not the storage place of human memories. So there is nothing in a brain that could be transferred to some machine to transfer your mind to a machine. 

You should not have an ounce of regret after reading of facts about brains that debunk the idea of mind uploading. The very reasons why it is will always be impossible to upload your mind into a computer or a robot are the same reasons why you won't ever need to do any such thing.  Your mind and memory cannot be explained by anything in the brain, and that means you must have a mind and memory because you have something like a soul. Having such a soul that is not a product of your brain, you need not worry about your existence ending when your brain dies. Bodies and brains die, but souls do not.  The massive evidence for paranormal phenomena such as out-of-body experiences, deathbed visions and near-death experiences provide independent reasons for thinking your mind will survive death. 

There is a rather recent paper on this topic of mind uploading, a paper with some false claims. The paper is published by something called "The World Journal of Advanced Research and Reviews," which does not seem to be an established and respected scientific journal, but one of the many "scientific journals" that make money from authors paying to get their papers published. Entitled "The Digital Afterlife: AI Cloud Consciousness as the New Immortality," the paper is by someone named Dhruvitkumar V. Talati, who seems to have no higher academic credentials such as a master's degree or a PhD.  Looking at Talati's achievements, as listed on the page here, we seem to see lots of good  experience with computers and technology. But the page says nothing about any training in neuroscience or psychology, nor does it mention any writings on such topics. Based on this page and the articles of Talati I see on Google Scholar, Talati does not seem like a very deep and serious scholar of either brains or minds; and his paper makes some false statements on these topics. 

Before discussing his misstatements, let me discuss the "brain-computer interfaces" which Talati frequently appeals to. Such things are unimpressive affairs, which do nothing to raise any hopes of mind uploading. The simplest thing that could be called a "brain computer interface" is simply an EEG device connected to a computer. Such a thing looks rather like this:

All that is going on in such an affair is that brain waves from a person are being read by use of an EEG head cap, with the brain wave data going to some computer. The data is extremely noisy data consisting of squiggly lines with lots of ups and downs. It looks like what we see below:

By analyzing such data, nothing can be understood about what a person is thinking or remembering. No one has ever been able to discover any "neural code" allowing someone to figure out what a person is thinking or remembering from analyzing such lines. Traces of muscle movements sometimes show up in such lines, and detection of such muscle movements may be misleadingly depicted as "thought reading." 

There is another type of "brain-computer interface" that is more invasive.  Electrodes may be implanted inside someone's brain. That does not offer much of anything more than what you get from an EEG cap that does not require opening up someone's skull. 

Recently some organizations have gone one step further, by implanting into someone's brain some tiny chip. Such a thing does nothing to create any real connection between a brain and a computer. Still the only thing that is occurring is the reading of electrical activity from the brain. 

It is important to clarify what is NOT occurring under these so-called "brain computer interfaces":

• No one is actually reading thoughts. A paralyzed person with such an invasive "brain computer interface" may be able to control a cursor (a little symbol on a computer screen) by moving such a cursor in different directions. But this occurs not by the reading of thoughts from the brain, but by the system picking up indications of muscle movements. Typically such systems include eye readers that can pick up tiny movements of the eye and eye focus, and cause a screen cursor to move in a corresponding way. And even if the eye is not directly tracked, because muscle movements cause blips in the lines of brain waves, it is rather easy to analyze brain waves and pick up things corresponding to tiny muscle movements or intended muscle movements. 
• No actual thought-deciphering of brain waves is occurring.  You cannot pick up what a person is thinking from brain waves. So if I silently think "Abraham Lincoln was a good leader," you can never pick up any such thought from analyzing brain waves. 
• There is no reading whatsoever of synapse states. 
• There is no reading whatsoever of neuron states. 
• There is no reading whatsoever of memories stored in a brain. Microscopic examination of brain tissue has never revealed any trace of learned knowledge or episodic memories by examining brain tissue. Microscopic examination has occurred abundantly with electron microscopes very many times larger than anything going on in a so-called brain-computer interface.  

Now lets look at some of the misstatements in Talati's paper. 

Talati: "The rapid advancements in neuroscience and brain mapping, coupled with the development of brain-computer interfaces, have paved the way for the potential transfer of human cognition into a digital medium." 

Reality: There has been no such progress -- no such way has been paved.  Claims of "mind reading" by insertion of brain chips are misleading. No actual "mind reading" is occurring, and the very meager results come from tricks such as eye-tracking, in which eye movements are used to guide a cursor.  The primitive "brain-computer interfaces" created thus far (described above) offer no reason for hoping that there could ever occur a "potential transfer of human cognition into a digital medium." 

Talati: "At the core of the concept of AI cloud consciousness lies the idea of transferring human cognition, thoughts, memories, and personality into a digital medium. This process involves the use of brain-computer interfaces and advanced neuroscience techniques to map and replicate an individual's neural patterns and cognitive processes (Campbell et al., 2002). With the proliferation of cloud computing and the ever-increasing capabilities of artificial intelligence, the storage and simulation of human consciousness within a virtual realm have become a tangible possibility."

Reality:  No one has done any work making the idea of mind uploading anything like a "tangible possibility." The progress of cloud computing and artificial intelligence is merely progress in computer programming and data processing.  There has been no neuroscience progress that should make anyone believe in the possibility of mind uploading. To the contrary, the more we learn about the physical shortfalls of brains, the less confidence we should have in the possibility of mind uploading. As discussed above, the "brain-computer interfaces" developed thus far are crude affairs offering no sound basis for suspecting a possibility of mind uploading. 

Talati: "Researchers in the field of neuroscience have made significant strides in mapping and understanding the complex neural patterns and cognitive processes that underlie human consciousness. (Campbell et al., 2002) (Goh, 2021) Through the use of advanced neuroimaging techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography, scientists have been able to identify and analyze the neural correlates of various cognitive functions, including memory, decision-making, and self-awareness."

Reality: The description of a human mind as mere "consciousness" is a profoundly misleading word trick of many modern writers, a trick I call "consciousness shadow speaking," in which something of oceanic depth (the human mind) is made to look like the faintest shadow of what it is. Human minds, human mental capabilities, and human mental experiences are a million times more complex than mere "consciousness." No progress has been made in explaining brain causes of the main facets of human mental activity. Scientists are utterly unable to explain how a brain could produce any such things as thinking, personhood, imagination, insight, learning, or recall. When scientists try to explain such things, they give us only the most vacuous hand-waving, such as incoherently trying to explain the formation of memories as "synapse strengthening."  

Excluding all of the "lying with colors" diagrams that mislead us by depicting tiny "1 part in 200" differences as if they were big differences, the search for neural correlates of mental functions has done nothing to substantiate claims that mental functions such as thinking, imagination, learning and recall are brain processes. As discussed here, here, and here, such studies typically show only tiny differences such as 1 part in 200 between resting brains and the brains of people engaging in mental activities.  As such differences are merely the type of differences we would expect from chance variations, they do nothing to support claims that mental activities are brain functions. 

Talati: "The field of brain-computer interfaces continues to evolve, with researchers working to overcome the complexities of neural dynamics and the potential impact of psycho-neurophysiological fluctuations on brain signals (Saha et al., 2021) (Maiseli et al., 2023) (Mak & Wolpaw, 2009). The advancement in neuroscience and the development of brain-computer interfaces form the scientific foundation of AI cloud consciousness (Mak & Wolpaw, 2009) (Rao et al., 2012) (Saha et al., 2021). BCI [brain-computer interfaces] serve as a critical bridge, enabling the translation of neural signals into digital commands that can be used to transfer and simulate human consciousness within a virtual environment."

It is rather obvious what is going on in the statement above. Talati is just repeating over and over again the phrase "brain-computer interfaces" or BCI, a phrase he uses 16 different times in his paper.  The references do nothing to establish any possibility of mind-uploading, because all so-called "brain computer interfaces" are very crude affairs which do little other than than analyze the noisy ups and downs of brain wave lines. While continuing again and again to appeal to "brain-computer interfaces,"  Talati is making some false statements. Specifically:

• It is very false that "the advancement in neuroscience and the development of brain-computer interfaces form the scientific foundation of AI cloud consciousness."  No work in these fields provide any basis for thinking that computers or artificial intelligence will ever be conscious. 
• It is utterly false that "BCI [so-called brain computer interfaces] serve as a critical bridge, enabling the translation of neural signals into digital commands that can be used to transfer and simulate human consciousness within a virtual environment."
• It is utterly false that "brain-computer interfaces...which serve as a critical enabler for mind uploading."  None of the work done in so-called brain-computer interfaces provide any realistic hope that a mind could ever be uploaded into a computer. 

We can tell the lack of any theoretical foundation for mind uploading by how infrequently Taliti refers to memory.  He makes no substantive references to memory. His paper's two uses of the word "memory" are both vacuous passing references, mere statements in which he claims that there are "neural correlates of various cognitive functions, including memory, decision-making, and self-awareness."  There is actually no good evidence that brains look or behave any different when you are learning, deciding or recalling.  Taliti's paper also makes no uses of the word "synapse" or "synaptic," and its only reference to neurons is the incorrect statement that humans have trillions of neurons (the actual number is something like 86 billion). It rather seems that when he wrote this paper on mind uploading, Taliti was neither a very deep and serious scholar of human brains, nor a very deep and serious scholar of human minds.  An excellent knowledge of computer technology does not qualify you to write a paper claiming that mind uploading will be possible. The more you objectively study brains and their many physical shortfalls which exclude them as a source of the human mind, the less you will tend to believe in the possibility of human minds being  uploaded into computers. And the more deeply and thoroughly you study human minds and human mental experiences and human mental capabilities in all their strange and spooky diversity, and the best examples of human mental performances, the less you will tend to believe in the possibility of human minds being  uploaded into computers.

No one should take seriously the notion of uploading minds into computers unless there is ever announced the electronic reading or microscopic reading of memories from human brains.  Such a thing has never occurred, and it never will occur. If human memories existed in human brains, scientists would have been able to read such memories around the year 1960, when microscopic technology advanced far enough to scan the tiniest components in brains. Around that same year of 1960, scientists were able to discover that there is genetic information in DNA, and were able to figure out the coding system by which such information is represented. 

Postscript: The paper "Long-term independent use of an intracortical brain-computer interface for speech and cursor control" is one that was promoted by news stories claiming progress in so-called "brain-computer interfaces." A look at the paper reveals that what is going on is a lot more than just analysis of brain waves.  The paper confesses, "The system independently using neural decoding, supplemented by eye gaze tracking to facilitate user-interface control." The next sentence confesses, "The speech decoder software ran continuously in the background and displayed decoded words on-screen in real time (Fig. 1C, left)." This involved specialized software for decoding garbled speech, something much different from brain wave analysis. There was also hand movement analysis, because we read this of the disabled person using the system: "He could also control his computer by attempting to move or squeeze his hand." So we have here at least three different ways in which the system was getting data from the user other than picking up his brain waves. It is misleading to use the term "brain-computer interfaces" for systems like this that involve so much more than just inputs from brains. 

Carefully designed devices can pick up a wealth of information from scanning human eyes. For example, given the right type of computer screen viewed by a paralyzed person or a person not using his hands, a carefully designed device can pick up direction indicators from eye movements alone.  Imagine a computer screen showing a scene like the one below:

Through the right technical setup (such as something with a camera looking from this screen to the viewer), you can get a "drive without touching anything" effect displaying on the screen, in which a viewer's gaze at position A causes the screen car to turn to the left, a viewer's gaze at position B causes the screen car to drive straight ahead, and a gaze at position C causes the screen car to turn to the right. If such a system is combined with some EEG apparatus reading brain waves, someone can make a claim that "thoughts in the brain are being read to move the car in 3D space," even though the brain waves are superfluous, and the system is really working based on eye movements. 

There are endless similar variations that might leverage eye movements or eye focus. For example, a screen might show three rows of choices: Choice 1, Choice 2 and Choice 3.  A system might be able to pick up a person focusing his eyes on any of these choices, with a corresponding action occurring. If combined with some EEG reading of brain waves, a neuroscientist might pass this system off as something that is "reading your brain's decisions," even though all that is happening is that eye focus on a particular screen position is being picked up, with the reading of brain waves being superfluous. 

The Reason You Will Never Be Able to Upload Your Mind Is the Same Reason You Won't Ever Need To

A very accomplished technologist and inventor, Ray Kurzweil has become famous for his prediction that there will before long be a “Singularity” in which machines become super-intelligent (a prediction make in his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near). In his 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines,  Ray Kurzweil made some very specific predictions about specific years: the year 2009, the year 2019, the year 2029, and the year 2072. Let's look at how well his predictions for the year 2019 hold up to reality. 

Prediction #1: “The computational ability of a $4,000 computing device (in 1999 dollars) is approximately equal to the computational capability of the human brain (20 million billion calculations per second)."

Reality: A $4000 computing device in 1999 dollars is equivalent to about a  7700 dollar computing device today. There is no $7700 computing device that can compute even a hundredth as fast as 

20 million billion calculations per second. The fastest current processor for a machine under $8000 is the Intel Core i9-14900KS, with a clock speed of about 6 gigahertz, only about 6 billion operations per second. If you shell out about 8000 dollars for a high-end gaming computer, you can get a few teraflops of floating point calculations per second.  Even if we use that figure rather than the clock speed, we still have computing capability more than 1000 times smaller than the computing capability predicted by Kurzweil for such a device in 2019. 

Prediction #2: “Computers are now largely invisible and are embedded everywhere – in walls, tables, chairs, desks, clothing, jewelry, and bodies.” 

Reality: Nothing like this has happened, and while computers are smaller and thinner, they are not at all "largely invisible."

Prediction #3: “Three-dimensional virtual reality displays, embedded in glasses and contact lenses, as well as auditory 'lenses,' are used routinely as primary interfaces for communication with other persons, computers, the Web, and virtual reality.” 

Reality: Such things are not at all used “routinely,” and I am aware of no cases in which they are ever used. There is very little communication through virtual reality displays, and when it is done it involves bulky apparatus like the Occulus Rift device, which resembles a scuba mask.

Prediction #4: “People routinely use three-dimensional displays built into their glasses,  or contact lenses. These 'direct eye' displays create highly realistic, virtual visual environments overlaying the "real" environment.

Reality: Very few people use any such technology, even in the year 2025. 

Prediction #5: “High-resolution, three dimensional visual and auditory virtual reality and realistic all-encompassing tactile environments enable people to do virtually anything with anybody, regardless of physical proximity." 

Reality: This sounds like a prediction of some reality similar to the Holodeck first depicted in the TV series Star Trek: The New Generation, or a prediction that realistic virtual sex will be available by 2019. Alas, we have no such things.

Prediction #6: “Paper books or documents are rarely used and most learning is conducted through intelligent, simulated software-based teachers.”

Reality: Paper books and documents are used much less commonly than in 1999, but it is not at all true that most learning  occurs through “intelligent, simulated software-based teachers.” 

Prediction #7: “The vast majority of transactions include a simulated person.”

Reality: A large percentage of transactions are electronic, but very few of them involve a simulated person.

Prediction #8: “Automated driving systems are now installed on most roads.”

Reality: Although there are a few self-driving cars on the road, 99% of traffic is old-fashioned traffic with human drivers.

Prediction #9: "Most flying weapons are small -- some as small as insects -- with microscopic flying weapons being researched."

Reality: The public has not yet even heard of tiny flying weapons.

Prediction #10: "The expected lifespan...has now substantially increased again, to over one hundred." 

Reality: A November 2023 article is entitled "Life expectancy for men in U.S. falls to 73 years — six years less than for women, per study."

Prediction #11: "Keyboards are rare."

Reality: No, keyboards were not rare either in 2019 or today. 

Prediction #12: "The majority of 'computes' of computers are now devoted to massively parallel neural nets and genetic algorithms."

Reality: Not true. So-called genetic algorithms are pretty useless as a computing methodology.  Software is not significantly developed through any Darwinian means, because random mutations with survival of the luckier results is not a workable method for creating very complex systems or very complex functional innovations, contrary to the claims of Darwinist biologists. Darwinism has flunked the software test.  

So Kurzweil's predictions for 2019 were very far off the mark. But Kurzweil is still playing the role of Grand Techno-Prophet. In a Freethink.com article last year, Kurzweil predicted that in the 2030's nanobots (microscopic robots injected into the body) will produce a great increase in lifespan. In the same article he predicted that the uploading of human minds into computers will occur by the 2040's.  Are there any reasons to think that his predictions for the 2030's and 2040's are unlikely to be correct? There certainly are. 

One reason is that Kurzweil never did much to prove his claim that there is a Law of Accelerating Returns causing the time interval between major events to grow shorter and shorter. On page 27 of The Age of Spiritual Machines he tries to derive this law from evolution, claiming that natural evolution follows such a law.  But we don't see such a law being observed in the history of life.  Not counting the appearance of humans, by far the biggest leap in biological order occurred not fairly recently, but about 540 million years ago, when almost all of the existing animal phyla appeared rather suddenly during the Cambrian Explosion.  No animal phylum has appeared in the past 480 million years. So we do not at all see such a Law of Accelerating Returns in the history of life.  There has, in fact, been no major leap in biological innovation during the past 30,000 years. 

Kurzweil's logic on page 27 contains an obvious flaw. He states this:

"The advance of technology is inherently an evolutionary process.  Indeed, it is a continuation of the same evolutionary process that gave rise to the technology-creating species. Therefore, in accordance with the Law of Accelerating Returns, the time interval between salient advances grows exponentially shorter as time passes." 

This is completely fallacious reasoning, both because the natural history of life has not actually followed a Law of Accelerating Returns, and also because the advance of technology is not a process like the evolutionary process postulated by Darwin.  The evolutionary process imagined by Darwin is blind, unguided, and natural, but the growth of technology is purposeful, guided and artificial.

On the same page, Kurzweil cites Moore's Law as justification for the Law of Accelerating Returns.  For a long time, this rule-of-thumb held true, that the speed of a transistor doubled every two years. But in 2015 Moore himself said, "I see Moore's law dying here in the next decade or so."  In the Wikipedia.org article on Moore's Law, we read, "Some forecasters, including Gordon Moore,[122] predict that Moore's law will end by around 2025." It is now clear that fundamental limits of making things smaller will cause Moore's Law to stop being true before long. 

 Machines smarter than humans would require stratospheric leaps forward in computer software, but computer software has never grown at anything like an exponential pace or an accelerating pace.  Nothing like Moore's Law has ever existed in the world of software development.  Kurzweil has occasionally attempted to suggest that evolutionary algorithms will produce some great leap that will speed up the rate of software development. But a 2018 review of evolutionary algorithms concludes that they have been of little use, and states: "Our analysis of relevant literature shows that no one has succeeded at evolving non-trivial software from scratch, in other words the Darwinian algorithm works in theory, but does not work in practice, when applied in the domain of software production." 

Page 256 of the document here refers to problems with software which throw cold water on hopes that progress with computers will be exponential:

"Lanier discusses software 'brittleness,'  'legacy code,' 'lock-in,' and 'other perversions' that work counter to the logic of Kurzweil’s exponential vision. It turns out there is also an exponential growth curve in programming and IT support jobs, as more and more talent and hours are drawn into managing, debugging, translating

incompatible databases, and protecting our exponentially better, cheaper, and more connected computers. This exponential countertrend suggests that humanity will

become 'a planet of help desks' long before the Singularity."

We already have something like this with so-called artificial intelligence systems, which by now involve databases and code so complex that no one adequately understands them. We hear talk of AI "hallucinations" that sound unfixable because the AI systems are "black boxes" that humans cannot dive in and debug as they would some code written by humans. 

As for Kurzweil's predictions about nanobots producing a surge in lifespan during the 2030's, there are strong reasons for doubting it.   Futurists have long advanced the idea that tiny nanobots might be injected into people, to circulate through the human body to repair its cells. But there may be technical reasons why such things are technically unfeasible. Nobel Prize winner Richard Smalley argued that the molecular assemblers imagined by nanotechnology enthusiast Eric Drexler were not feasible, because of various scientific reasons such as what he called the “fat fingers” problem.

There is another strong reason for rejecting the idea that nanobots will be able to produce some great increase in human lifespan. The reason is the stratospheric complexity of human biology and the vast levels of organization in human bodies.  Transhumanists have generally tended to  fail to understand the stratospheric amount of organization and functional complexity in living things.  An objective and very thorough scholar of biological complexity will be very skeptical of any claim that devices that humans manufacture will be able to make humans live very much longer. There is so very much about the fundamentals of human life that biologists still don't understand.  The visual below illustrates the situation. The problems listed are problems a hundred miles over the heads of scientists. 

While scientists can list stages in cell reproduction, scientists are unable to even explain the marvel of cell reproduction, which for many cells is a feat as impressive as an automobile splitting up to become two separate working automobiles. Scientists cannot even explain how protein molecules are able to fold into the three-dimensional shapes needed for their functions, shapes not specified by DNA.  Without resorting to lies such as the lie that DNA is a body blueprint, no scientist can credibly explain how a speck-sized zygote (existing just after female impregnation) is able to progress over nine months to become the vast hierarchical  organization of the human body.  No scientist has  a decent physical explanation of how memories can form, or how they can persist for a lifetime. No scientist has a decent explanation of how humans are able to instantly recall lots of detailed relevant information as soon as they hear a name mentioned, or see of photo of someone, a feat that should be impossible using a brain that is completely lacking in sorting, indexes and addresses (the type of things that make instant recall possible).  

With human knowledge being so fragmentary, and so many basic problems of explaining humans and their minds being so far over the heads of scientists, how improbable is it that humans will be able to overhaul their biology on the microscopic level by using microscopic robots called nanobots, or any other technology we can envision in the next fifty years?

The biggest reason for doubting Kurzweil's predictions beyond 2019 is that they are based on assumptions about the brain and mind that are incorrect. Kurzweil is an uncritical consumer of neuroscientist dogmas about the brain and mind. He assumes that the mind must be a product of the brain, and that memories must be stored in the brain, because that is what neuroscientists typically claim. If he had made an adequate study of the topic, he would have found that the low-level facts collected by neuroscientists do not support the high-level claims that neuroscientists make about the brain, and frequently contradict such claims. To give a few examples:

• There is no place in the brain suitable for storing memories that last for decades, and things like synapses and dendritic spines (alleged to be involved in memory storage) are unstable, "shifting sands" kind of things which do not last for years, and which consist of proteins that only last for weeks.
• The synapses that transmit signals in the brain are very noisy and unreliable,  in contrast to humans who can recall very large amounts of memorized information without error.
• Signal transmission in the brain must mainly be a snail's pace affair, because of very serious slowing factors such as synaptic delays and synaptic fatigue (wrongly ignored by those who write about the speed of brain signals), meaning brains are too slow to explain instantaneous human memory recall.
• The brain seems to have no mechanism for reading memories.
• The brain seems to have no mechanism for writing memories, nothing like the read-write heads found in computers.
• The brain has nothing that might explain the instantaneous recall of long-ago-learned information that humans routinely display, and has nothing like the things that allow instant data retrieval in computers.
• Brain tissue has been studied at the most minute resolution, and it shows no sign of storing any encoded information (such as memory information) other than the genetic information that is in almost every cell of the body.
• There is no sign that the brain or the human genome has any of the vast genomic apparatus it would need to have to accomplish the gigantic task of converting learned conceptual knowledge and episodic memories into neural states or synapse states (the task would presumably require thousands  of specialized proteins, and there's no real sign that such memory-encoding proteins exist)
• No neuroscientist has ever given a detailed explanation of how such a gigantic translation task of memory encoding could be accomplished (one that included precise, detailed examples).
• Contrary to the claim that brains store memories and produce our thinking, case histories show that humans can lose half or more of their brains (due to disease or hemispherectomy operations), and suffer little damage to memory or intelligence (as discussed here). 

Had he made a study of paranormal phenomena, something he shows no signs of having studied, Kurzweil might have come to the same idea suggested by the neuroscience facts above: that the brain cannot be an explanation for the human mind and human memory, and that these things must be aspects of some reality that is not neural, probably a spiritual dimension of humanity.

Since he believes that our minds are merely the products of our brains, Kurzweil thinks that we will be able to make machines as intelligent as we are, and eventually far more intelligent than we are, by somehow leveraging some "mind from matter" principle used by the human brain. But no one has any credible account of what such a principle could be, and certainly Kurzweil does not (although he tried to create an impression of knowledge about this topic with his book How to Create a Mind).   We already know the details of the structure and physiology of the brain, and what is going on in the brain in terms of matter and energy movement.  Such details do nothing to clarify any "mind from matter" principle that might explain how a brain could generate a mind, or be leveraged to make super-intelligent machines. 

In general, transhumanists tend to be poor scholars of four very important topics:

(1) Transhumanists tend to be poor scholars of biological complexity and the vast amount of organization and fine-tuned functionality in human bodies. So they make naive claims such as that injected microscopic robots will soon be able to fix your cells and double your lifespan, failing to realize the unlikelihood of that, given the vast complexity of interdependent components in the human body and the vast complexity of human cells and the biochemistry of human bodies. 

(2) Transhumanists tend to be poor scholars of genetics and human DNA. A proper study of the topic will help you realize that genes do not explain either the origin of the human body or the characteristics of the human mind. DNA merely has low-level chemical information, not high-level anatomical information, and not any information that can explain mind or memory.  We have an example of very bad transhumanist misunderstanding of DNA on page 2 of Kurzweil's book "How to Create a Mind" where he incorrectly states, "A billion years later a complex molecule called DNA evolved, which could 

precisely encode lengthy strings of information and generate organisms described by these 'programs.' " DNA has no specification of how to make an organism or any of its organs or any of its cells. There are no programs in DNA, but merely lists of chemical ingredients, such as which amino acids make up a particular protein.  The idea that an organism is built by DNA is childish nonsense. DNA has no blueprint for constructing an organism, and even if it did, it would not explain how organisms get built, because blueprints don't build things. Things get built with the help of blueprints only when intelligent agents read blueprints to get ideas about how to build things. 

(3) Transhumanists tend to be poor scholars of human minds,  and the vast diversity of human experiences, normal and paranormal. A proper study of two hundred years of evidence for paranormal phenomena leads to the conclusion that humans are souls, not products of brains. 

(4) Transhumanists tend to be poor scholars of human brains and their physical shortfalls which rule out brains as a credible explanations for human minds.  Ask a transhumanist about things such as the average lifetime of brain proteins or the transmission reliability rate of chemical synapses, and you won't be likely to get the right answer.  

Last year Kurzweil made this very glaring misstatement:

"I’m really the only person that predicted the tremendous AI interest that we’re seeing today. In 1999 people thought that would take a century or more." 

Not true at all. Countless writers predicted that we would have machines as smart as people by the year 2000, and in 1999 futurists were typically predicting that this would happen by about this year (2025). Page 12 of the paper here gives a graph showing that 8 experts predicted that computers would have human level intelligence by about the year 2000, that 9 other experts predicted that computers would have human level intelligence by the year 2025, and that 12 other experts predicted that computers would have human level intelligence by the year 2030. In the same interview, Kurzweil makes the gigantically false claim that our understanding of biology is progressing exponentially. To the contrary, biologists are stuck from an explanatory standpoint, still light-years away from credibly explaining  how there occurs the most basic aspects of biology such as consciousness, cell reproduction, morphogenesis, human self-hood, human understanding,  instant human recall, the creation and formation of memories by humans, and the progression from a speck-sized zygote to a full human body. Biologists cannot credibly explain the origin of life or the origin of any type of protein molecule or any type of cell in the human body, such things being vastly too complex and vastly too organized to be credibly explained by Darwinian ideas. From an explanatory standpoint, neuroscientists are stuck in the mud, and getting nowhere, as they have been for decades. You might think otherwise from all the press releases about low-quality experimental studies guilty of defects such as way-too-small study group sizes. 

On page 4 of his 2013 book "How to Create a Mind" Kurzweil stated most incorrectly, "We are rapidly reverse-engineering the information processes that underlie biology including that of our brains." Nothing of the sort was being done then, and nothing of the sort is being done now. Biologists lack any understanding of how a human can think or learn or recall by any brain mechanism, and when they try to sound like they have some knowledge of such things, we usually get nothing but vacuous hand-waving. There are some very successful types of computer programs that have misnomer biological-sounding names such as "neural nets," but such programs do not actually have characteristics matching those of the brain or any part of the brain. 

The main reason you will not ever be able to upload your mind into a computer is that such an idea is based on the assumption that your brain creates your mind and that your brain stores your memories: an assumption that is not correct.  You are not your brain, but a soul. But you need not worry a bit about the impossibility of uploading minds into computers. The very reality that makes such a thing impossible is a reality that makes such a thing unnecessary. You do not need to upload your mind into a computer, because your mind is a soul reality that will not die when your brain and body dies.  One of the main types of evidence for this are out-of-body experiences, with quite a few features beyond any credible explanation of neuroscientists (as discussed here). 

What the Neuroscientist Should Have Said When Asked About Mind Uploading

The web site The Conversation at www.theconversation.com is one of numerous mainstream web sites that attempt to propagate the talking points of materialist thinkers, usually in a very one-sided way in which all kinds of very important relevant facts are hidden from readers.  Recently the site had an article entitled "When Will I Be Able to Upload My Brain to a Computer?" A neuroscientist professor named Guillaume Thierry answers a reader's question, which was this:

"I am 59 years old, and in reasonably good health. Is it possible that I will live long enough to put my brain into a computer? Richard Dixon."  

Professor Thierry answered the question in a poor fashion. He spoke largely as if the underlying assumption behind the question was a valid one. He should have discussed many facts of neuroscience that indicate the underlying assumption behind the question is an incorrect one. Although the question is rather awkwardly phrased, it is rather clear what assumption was behind the question asked by Mr. Dixon. The assumption was that there is some information and matter arrangement in a brain which somehow constitutes a person, and that it might be possible to transfer such information and matter arrangement to a computer. 

The first thing that Professor Thierry should have discussed is that there is zero evidence that brains store information in the way that computers store information. Computers store information in a binary format which is also sometimes called a digital format. In such a format information is stored by a series of ones and zeros, such as 101010011010010101100101010111000. There is no evidence that brains store information in any such manner. There seems to be nothing in a brain or neurons or synapses that would allow storage of information in any such manner.  We can imagine a physical structuring of an organ that would allow the storage of long binary sequences such as 10010101000011110001010101000111100101.  The brain seems to have no physical component allowing any such storage. 

We do know that neurons store information, but the only information ever discovered in a neuron is genetic information, the information stored in the nucleus of every cell. Such information is merely low-level chemical information, such as which amino acids make up particular protein molecules.  The only type of information that has been discovered in neurons is the same low-level chemical information found in kidney cells and skin cells and heart cells and foot cells. No one has ever discovered any binary sequence such as 10010101000011110001010101000111100101 in a human brain. 

Besides mentioning that there is no sign of any mechanism in a brain that could possibly store digital or binary information such as used by computers, Professor Thierry should have also mentioned that there is simply no physical signs of learned information stored in a brain in any kind of non-digital or non-binary organized format that resembles some kind of system of representation. We can imagine other ways in which information could be stored in a brain, some way that did not involve the simplicity of repeated ones and zeroes. If any other way was used, it would tend to have an easily detected hallmark: the hallmark of token repetition.  There would be some system of tokens, each of which would represent something, perhaps a sound or a color pixel or a letter. There would be very many repetitions of different types of symbolic tokens.   Some examples of tokens are given below. Other examples of tokens include nucleotide base pairs (which in particular combinations of 3 base pairs represent particular amino acids), and also coins and bills (some particular combination of coins and bills can represent some particular amount of wealth). 

Examples of symbolic tokens

Other than the nucleotide base pair triple combinations that represent mere low-level chemical information such as amino acids, something found in neurons and many other types of cells outside of the brain, there is no sign at all of any repetition of symbolic tokens in the brain. Except for genetic information which is merely low-level chemical information, we can find none of the hallmarks of symbolic information (the repetition of symbolic tokens) inside the brain. No one has ever found anything that looks like traces or remnants of learned information by studying brain tissue. If you cut off some piece of brain tissue when someone dies, and place it under the most powerful electron microscope, you will never find any evidence that such tissue stored information learned during a lifetime, and you will never be able to figure out what a person learned from studying such tissue.  This is one reason why scientists and law enforcement officials never bother to preserve the brains of dead people in hopes of learning something about what such people experienced during their lives, or what they thought or believed, or what deeds they committed.    

Besides seeing no signs of stored memory information in brains, scientists are completely lacking in any detailed credible theory of how it is that a brain could store the type of things that people learn during their lifetimes. The difficulties of coming up with such a theory are endless. One gigantic difficulty is that humans learn a dizzying variety of things (sights, sounds, sensations, words, music, feelings, thoughts, concepts, muscle movements, and so forth), meaning that no imaginable system of symbolic encoding could handle even a third of the types of things people can learn. Another difficulty is that people are capable of remembering extremely long sequences of words and letters. But the very alphabets that are used to store such letters have only existed for a few thousand years.  There is no evidence that humans have undergone some great brain change in the past few thousand years that might help to explain a storage of great amounts of information using alphabets that have only existed for a few thousand years. A scientific paper discussing human evolution in the past two thousand years tells us that "aside from height and body mass index (BMI), evidence for selection on other complex traits has generally been weak," and that there are merely faint signals for human evolution in a few other areas: "increased infant head circumference and birth weight, and increases in female hip size; as well as on variants underlying metabolic traits; male-specific signal for decreased BMI; and in favor of later sexual maturation in women, but not in men," in addition  to "strong signals of selection at lactase and the major histocompatibility complex, and in favor of blond hair and blue eyes." There is no mention of any dramatic brain evolution that might explain a recent ability to store memories using alphabets that only arose in the past few thousand years. 

The same problem exists in regard to explaining a human ability to remember oral music. Such music is expressed using a musical notation system that is only a few centuries old. But humans have no problem remembering vast lengths of oral music. In his prime performing years Placido Domingo was famous for having memorized male operatic roles in countless different operas, which altogether made up very many hours of singing he could perform without error. 

The inability of neuroscientists to explain such wonders of memorization is not some minor shortfall. There is literally not a neuroscientist in the world who can give a credible detailed explanation of how anyone could store the simple phrase "my dog has fleas" in his brain or even the first line of the song "Mary had a little lamb." Yet there are Islamic scholars who have memorized every line of their holy book of 114 chapters, and actors and singers who have perfectly memorized very long roles such as Hamlet and Siegfried.

When asked to explain such things, all neuroscientists can do is mention little facts that fail to sound anything like an explanation for human memory.  They may utter phrases such as "synaptic strengthening," ignoring the fact that the lifetimes of the proteins that make up synapses are about 1000 times shorter than the maximum length of time that humans can remember thing.  The failure of neuroscientists to explain other aspects of human mentality is just as large. No neuroscientist has a credible explanation for such basic human mental realities as imagination or abstract thinking or insight.   

On another web page a neuroscientist seems to confess that he and his colleagues have no idea of how groups of neurons could give rise to thoughts or emotions. He states this:

"We need to understand how circuits of cells give rise to a thought, an emotion, a behavior. And this will be extremely difficult to penetrate.” 

I have repeatedly argued on this blog (in posts such as this and this)  that physical limitations of brains mean that brains should be way too slow to account for things such as lightning-fast human thinking and recall. I found a scientific paper in which scientists confess just how bad is the speed problem within human brains. In the paper "Emission of Mitochondrial Biophotons and their Effect on Electrical Activity of Membrane via Microtubules," six scientists (some of them neuroscientists) make this interesting confession:

"Synaptic transmission and axonal transfer of nerve impulses are too slow to organize coordinated activity in large areas of the central nervous system. Numerous observations confirm this view. The duration of a synaptic transmission is at least 0.5 ms, thus the transmission across thousands of synapses takes about hundreds or even thousands of milliseconds. The transmission speed of action potentials varies between 0.5 m/s and 120 m/s along an axon. More than 50% of the nerves fibers in the corpus callosum are without myelin, thus their speed is reduced to 0.5 m/s. How can these low velocities (i.e. classical signals) explain the fast processing in the nervous system?"

Rather than candidly confessing such realities when asked about loading brains into computers, Professor Thierry speaks like someone with an underlying attitude of "we haven't done this yet because it's very hard." What he should have said is something like, "You should have every doubt that such a thing is possible, no matter how much we learn about the brain or computers."  Similarly, suppose you ask a soil expert, "When will I be able to know all about the lives of all the previous owners of my land by analyzing the land's soil?" Such an expert will be giving you the wrong answer if he talks about how such a thing is hard. He will be pointing you in the right direction if he tells you there is no good reason to think that such a thing will ever be possible.

In responding to the question, Professor Thierry acted like a typical neuroscientist, by using the question to try and impress us by listing many little facts that he has learned. In answering the question he should have candidly confessed all of the things he does not know and does not understand about brains, mentality and memory. But neuroscientists don't like getting started on such a discussion, which rapidly leads us to questions that cause us to doubt the dogmas that neuroscientists keep spouting. So I'm sure Professor Thierry would have preferred not to start discussing his ignorance of why people near death so often report themselves floating out of their bodies and observing their bodies from above, a type of observation entirely inconsistent with claims that brains are the source of the human mind.  And I'm sure Professor Thierry would have preferred not to start discussing his ignorance of how humans are able to perfectly recall vast bodies of information, even though each synaptic gap  transmits signals with a reliability of less than 50%, which should make such recall impossible if it were occurring from neural activity. And I'm sure Professor Thierry would have preferred not to start discussing his ignorance of how mind and memory is well-preserved after half of a brain is removed to treat very bad seizures in epileptics, an observational reality dramatically inconsistent with the dogmas of neuroscientists. 

Instead of telling us the neuroscience reality that no one has ever found any memory information by studying brain tissue, Professor Thierry advanced a groundless and easily discredited  speculation when he stated this: "Information in the brain is stored in every detail of its physical structure of the connections between neurons: their size and shape, as well as the number and location of connections between them."  No one has any understanding of how learned information such as facts learned in school could ever be represented by changes in the sizes, shapes, numbers or locations of connections between neurons, nor does anyone have any credible detailed theory of how information could be stored in such a way. No evidence of symbolic tokens or information representation can be found by studying such connections. To the contrary, what we have learned about such connections (synapses) suggests the impossibility of the claim  Thierry states. We know that synapses are "shifting sands" type of things, not stable structures that stay the same for decades. The proteins in synapses have average lifetimes of only a few weeks.  Synapses are connected to unstable structures called dendritic spines, which have typical lifetimes of only a few weeks or months, and which don't last for years.  See my post "Imaging of Dendritic Spines Hint That Brains Are Too Unstable to Store Memories for Decades" for the relevant observations. 

Given all this structural instability in synapses and their attached dendritic spines, and the constant very high levels of molecular turnover in such things,  we should not believe the speculation that synapses are storing human memories which can survive with remarkable stability for 50 years or longer. Resembling the tangled, ever-changing vines in a dense part of the Amazon rain forest, synapses no more resemble an information storage system than do some jumble of such vines. No neuroscientist could ever even tell a credible detailed tale of how the mere phrase "my dog has fleas" could be stored by some variation in the size, shape, strength, number or location of brain connections (synapses). 

Alarm bells should go off in our minds when we read Professor Thierry state this: "The brain seamlessly and constantly integrates signals from all the senses to produce internal representations, makes predictions about these representations, and ultimately creates conscious awareness (our feeling of being alive and being ourselves) in a way that is still a total mystery to us." When someone claims that something occurs in way that is a total mystery to him, it is often the case that no such thing is actually occurring. We have no actual evidence that brains "produce internal representations" from sensory signals, and no permanent signs of such internal representations can be found by studying brain tissue. We know that humans make predictions, but do not know that brains make predictions, nor do we know that brains create conscious awareness. From near-death experiences that may involve vivid conscious awareness during cardiac arrest in which the heart has stopped and the brain is shut down, we have a very strong reason for doubting claims that brains produce conscious awareness. In general we should tend to be skeptical about claims that x produces y when such claims are made by people confessing that such a thing happens in some way that is a total mystery. 

If some old person is afraid of death and asks you about mind uploading, you might think: don't burst the guy's bubble and throw cold water on his hopes. But there's no reason to keep afloat hopes of immortality by mind uploading. A much better thing to do would be to explain all the reasons why it is utterly fallacious to think that you will be able to transfer your mind and memory into a robot or computer, and to include within that discussion some mention of how such reasons (and also many other reasons) should lead you to suspect that your mind and memory will survive the death of your body, largely on the grounds that there is nothing in your brain or body that can explain your mind and your memory.