You can link to this page with: mindamyers.com/wbe

Introduction

In May 2024, I asked Randal Koene, PhD in Computational Neuroscience and Founder of Carboncopies, for a curriculum to learn state-of-the-art mind uploading (more formally called Whole Brain Emulation). The following “mini-course” lays out a series of topics and related papers based on his message. It provides links to each of the documents that have been downloaded and compressed for portability and the ease of loading into a foundational model, such as ChatGPT or Claude.

I hope to add my own notes here as I go through the curriculum in the coming months…

Contents

Course Description:

This mini course explores the challenges and current state-of-the-art in Whole Brain Emulation (WBE). It is designed for those interested in understanding the complexities and recent advancements in the field, with a focus on critical literature that represents significant progress and ongoing challenges.

Understanding Success Criteria for WBE

• Objective: Define the goals and success criteria for WBE, focusing on desired experiences and the differences between emulation and simulation.
• Content:
  • Goals for WBE: Continuation or return to life with the same personality, memories, and cognitive abilities.
  • Differentiating Emulation from Simulation: Emulation aims to achieve a desired experience, unlike simulation, which tests hypotheses.
  • Upcoming Literature: A paper on the success criteria for WBE and associated validation metrics is currently being written.

Levels of Reconstruction

• Objective: Explore the importance of reconstruction from brain data to a working system that meets WBE criteria.
• Content:
  • Experimental Verification: Actual reconstructions that run are essential for verifying reconstruction levels.
  • Recommended Reading:

    • Billeh et al (2020), "Systematic Integration of Structural and Functional Data into Multi-scale Models of Mouse Primary Visual Cortex" Read

      Systematic Integration of Structural and Functional Data into Multi-scale Models of Mouse Primary Visual Cortex.pdf

    • Garner et al (2023), "Connectomic reconstruction predicts the functional organization of visual inputs to the navigation center of the Drosophila brain" Read

      Connectomic reconstruction predicts the functional organization of visual inputs to the navigation center of the Drosophila brain.pdf

Data Collection

• Objective: Understand the methods for collecting brain data with sufficient reliability and resolution at scale.