TedEd: How close are we to uploading our minds?

A TedEd by Michael S. A. Graziano

Could we avoid death one day by uploading our minds? In such a future, the deceased could live in a simulated world with an avatar and also be able to communicate with living people. So what would it take to do that? First, we need to know what to scan. Our brains have billions of neurons with trillions of synapses to connect them, all of which is called the connectome. There are also hundreds of types of synapses, all of which serve a different purpose. There are also many other influences on neural patterns, many of which are largely unknown. For example, a cell type called glia were once thought to simply support the brain, but scientists now believe that some can influence our brains. We simply don't understand enough about the brain to know what parts to scan. Once we figure that out, there is the problem of actually scanning the brain itself. To properly scan the brain, we would need resolution of up to 1/1000 of a millimeter. Our best scanning method so far, MRI, can only do a half of a millimeter. Because it relies on magnetic fields, a field strong enough to get good resolution would cook a person's brain. That means we need to conceive a new scanning method altogether. The final step would be to turn a scanned brain into digital information. We need a lot of computing power and storage to do this, but we are actually closer to our goal in this regard. Finally, there is the ethical dilemma. Who would get to upload their minds, and what rights would they have? Could the system be abused? So even if we do get the technological capacity to upload our minds, should we?