This may sound like a bizzare question, but from what I’ve seen while lurking here, the bizzare questions already asked are hard acts to follow. In any event, some feel that computers may hold the key to escaping the bounds of human lifespans. Perhaps an alternate reality (such as the kind of stuff seen in The Matrix just with real computer science behind it) could save us from death.
The questions are: What would need to be done to convert the contents of one’s brain into data form? And if you did succeed in doing this, would a person be able to be consious outside of one’s body on a mainframe or something like that?
The real answer is that nobody has any idea. I went to graduate school in neuroscience and I can attest that brain study is both much more advanced and much more poorly understood that commonly believe. It is more understood in the sense that biological markers have been found for things like being gay and different mental illnesses. I am not sure how most of the common public thinks of the brain is but it is definitely an organ just like any other. You can map some traits to biological correlates…
The part that falls far short (and this is the problem with your idea) is that nobody has any idea of how biological neural networks actually work. There are trillions and trillions of connections in the human brain. They all do something but we don’t understand the most basic way about how information is encoded. This is still being studied mostly at the cellular level but the real understanding of how this impacts behavior has to come from the understanding of large networks of cells and not too much is understood in that area.
There is nothing we can read and store from the brain in any meaningful way. We could do an MRI or a brain scan but that is just a gross measure of grossly aggregated data. Assuming we could read it, I have no idea what type of hard drive it would sit on. It might have to be thousands of times bigger than our largest now just for one person.
Then there is the problem of what we do with the info. Re-implanting it will be much harder than getting it in the first place.
If you need to add twenty thousand numbers, a computer can do it in a fraction of a second. A brain would find the task almost impossible. There is nothing on the surface of the earth that can add numbers faster than a computer.
On the other hand, pick up an apple. In a fraction of a second, your brain figures out that out of all of the millions of things you can recognize, it is an apple, and brings up all sorts of apple related things into your concious mind. A computer would find that task almost impossible. There’s nothing on the surface of the earth that can pattern match faster than a human brain.
These two simple examples show how different a brain is from a computer. A brain doesn’t store its information as simple, organized data the way a computer does. There is no way to break down a brain into simple bits of data, and emulate it using a machine who’s entire architecture is so vastly different. A computer channels very organized data through a very narrow data path. Brains channel their data through thousands and thousands of data paths. The architectures are so different that there is no way you can ever break down a brain and store it in a computer.
The brain is basically a collection of neurons. Imagine the brain as a big building with lots of rooms. Each room is square and has one door in each wall. Each room represents a neuron. When a thought first enters the brain (such as, Move Left Arm), a neuron fires. When a neuron fires it triggers some adjacent neurons to fire. Which then trigger other neurons and so on.
This firing mechanism is like a gust of wind that blows into the building. It blows into the first room and in that room some of the doors will be well-oiled and will open easily but some will be stiff and will not open. So the gust carries on following the path of least resistance. Eventually the the chain of firing neurons will reach the final neuron which actually triggers the left arm to move.
If we could represent each neuron as a mathematical value figuring out which neurons any given neuron would trigger then we could write these values down in a book. This neuron X will trigger these neurons A,B,C. With each page representing one neuron. It would be a huge book but could probably be done with computers.
I think we still have Einstein’s brain in a jar somewhere, and also Newton’s. So theoretically we could enter a question into Newton’s brain-book and get an answer that Newton would give us. Or we could get Newton’s brain to ask Einstein’s brain a question and get a conversation going. You just feed the question into the book and see which neurons it would trigger and then follow the trail until you get an answer.
I think I read the above theory in The Mind’s Eye, a fantastic book which I recommend to all.
Nobody really knows, but there are a few interesting theoretical takes on the subject. Ray Kurzweil wrote a book called “The Age of Spiritual Machines” or something like that.
From a pure data storage perspective, I think the algorithm is pretty clear. Every neuron has a number of inputs connections and output connection. Each input has differing degrees of strength to excite or inhibit an output. The nature of the outputs depends on what’s coming in. So if you were able to map these characteristics for every single neuron in the brain, I’d think you’d have a pretty good representation of that individual. The problem is that we lack the technology to do this kind of scanning non-invasively, and if we did, it would take way too long to process the data. Even if, miraculously, we could map the entire brain within a month or two, the integrity would be questionable because it would have changed since then.
More to the point, each Neuron can have connections to neutrons close and far, and we have no real method of tracking those; it may be that such methods are simply not possible. Also, the brain is analog. You cannot perfectly translate analog to digital. Information must be lost. In something as complex and intricate as the brain, that information may be considerable.