Mind Uploading integrated guide
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Integrated Guide · Chapter 1

History — a century of speculation becoming science.

Mind uploading began as an idea in 1929. It acquired its first scientific foothold in 1986, when the complete wiring diagram of a nematode was published, and its first engineering blueprint in 2008. In the 2020s it entered a phase of exponential acceleration. This chapter traces who achieved what, and when, with primary sources throughout.

Span: 1929–2026Four eras35 references
In this chapter
  1. 1.1 Origins (1929–1985)
  2. 1.2 First maps and a community (1986–2007)
  3. 1.3 The roadmap era (2008–2019)
  4. 1.4 Acceleration (2020–2026)
  5. 1.5 Science fiction as a laboratory
  6. 1.6 Three patterns in the record
  7. References

1.1 Origins

Origins (1929–1985).

The idea of uploading is older than the computer. First came the intuition that the brain is a physical system and will eventually become an engineering object; the mathematics of neuroscience caught up afterwards.

  1. 1929

    J. D. Bernal, The World, the Flesh and the Devil

    The crystallographer J. D. Bernal argued that humanity would ultimately transfer the brain into mechanical bodies and escape its biological limits1. It is generally cited as the earliest systematic statement of mind-to-machine transfer.

  2. 1952

    The Hodgkin–Huxley model

    The action potential was shown to be quantitatively describable by differential equations2, giving empirical grounding to the premise underlying all of WBE: that the brain is a physical system which can in principle be computed and simulated. The work earned a Nobel Prize in 1963.

  3. 1956

    Clarke's The City and the Stars

    Arthur C. Clarke depicted Diaspar, a city that stores its inhabitants' personalities in memory banks and regenerates their bodies3. Personality-as-information entered the science-fiction vocabulary.

  4. 1962/64

    Ettinger and the cryonics movement

    Robert Ettinger's The Prospect of Immortality proposed preserving patients whom current medicine cannot save and entrusting them to future technology4. The movement that would later host brain-preservation research began here (Alcor was founded in 1972).

  5. 1971

    Martin's academic proposal

    The gerontologist George M. Martin formally proposed, in a peer-reviewed journal, chemically fixing and storing the brain so that a future technology might recover the mind5 — among the earliest appearances of upload-like reasoning in the academic literature.

  6. 1984

    Gibson's Neuromancer

    The Dixie Flatline, a recorded personality construct, appears. Cyberpunk carried the image of the digitised mind into popular culture.

1.2 First Maps & Community

First maps and a community (1986–2007).

In 1986 the complete wiring diagram of a 302-neuron nematode was published, demonstrating that copying an entire nervous system was possible in principle. Around the same time, an intellectual community formed that took uploading seriously.

  1. 1986

    The nematode connectome — "The Mind of a Worm"

    White and colleagues reconstructed all 302 neurons of C. elegans and their connections from serial-section electron microscopy6. It took well over a decade of manual work. This was the first complete nervous-system wiring diagram and remains the origin point of all connectomics.

  2. 1988

    Moravec's Mind Children

    The roboticist Hans Moravec described, concretely, a procedure in which surgical robots scan and replace the brain piece by piece — gradual uploading7. This is the starting point for uploading as a technical proposal; Moravec estimated the middle of the 21st century.

  3. 1989–94

    "Uploading" becomes a term of art

    The word settled into use in transhumanist circles such as Extropy. Vinge referenced uploading in his 1993 singularity paper, and in 1994 Robin Hanson published the first systematic economic analysis of an upload society8.

  4. 1994

    Egan's Permutation City

    Greg Egan pushed the questions of subjective continuity and the relationship between computation and consciousness to their limits9. The book is still cited in philosophical discussion of the copy problem (Chapter 5).

  5. 1999/2005

    Kurzweil popularises the idea

    The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity Is Near turned singularity thinking, uploading included, into international bestsellers10, spreading the specific predictions of 2030s scanning technology and a 2045 singularity.

  6. 2005

    The Blue Brain Project begins

    Henry Markram began biophysical simulation of cortical microcircuitry at EPFL on IBM supercomputers11. Reconstructing a brain in a computer received major research funding for the first time.

  7. 2007

    The Oxford WBE workshop

    The Future of Humanity Institute convened the first whole brain emulation workshop, which fed directly into the roadmap published the following year.

1.3 The Roadmap Era

The roadmap and big neuroscience (2008–2019).

In 2008, Sandberg and Bostrom published a blueprint declaring that WBE was not a philosophy but a decomposable engineering problem. Through the 2010s, national brain projects and new measurement techniques began — largely without intending to — building its components.

  1. 2008

    Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap

    Sandberg and Bostrom laid out, across 130 pages, the levels of resolution that might be required, the state and demands of scanning, reconstruction and computation, and the remaining uncertainties12. It has been the field's shared vocabulary for nearly twenty years (see Chapter 2).

  2. 2010

    The Brain Preservation Foundation and Carboncopies

    Kenneth Hayworth founded the Brain Preservation Foundation and created a technology prize for preserving a whole brain at synaptic resolution13. Randal Koene founded the non-profit Carboncopies and formalised the research programme of "substrate-independent minds".

  3. 2011

    OpenWorm begins

    An open-source effort to simulate an entire nematode14. Its failures proved more valuable than its successes: it taught the field the "nematode paradox" (Chapter 3) — that having a connectome is nowhere near enough to reproduce function.

  4. 2013

    The Human Brain Project and the BRAIN Initiative

    The EU launched the roughly €600-million HBP and the United States the BRAIN Initiative. The HBP's promise to simulate a human brain within a decade provoked a backlash from the scientific community15 and left an expensive lesson about governing large-scale neuroscience.

  5. 2015–18

    A breakthrough in preservation

    McIntyre and Fahy developed aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation16, which won the BPF's Small Mammal Prize for a rabbit brain in 2016 and its Large Mammal Prize for a pig brain in 2018 — demonstrating whole-brain preservation with synaptic structure intact.

  6. 2018

    The Nectome controversy

    Nectome, a startup intending to offer ASC to humans, was reported as selling a "100 percent fatal" upload-contingent service, and MIT ended its affiliation17. It was the field's first major public controversy over the gap between scientific evidence and marketing.

  7. 2017–19

    Readout and mapping industrialise

    Neuropixels probes arrived, recording thousands of channels at once18. Complete connectomes of both nematode sexes were published in 201919, and the 25,000-neuron fly "hemibrain" was nearing release. AI segmentation began breaking the limits of manual reconstruction.

1.4 Acceleration

Acceleration (2020–2026).

In the 2020s, connectome scale jumped by orders of magnitude — 302 to 3,016 to 139,255 neurons — and the field entered the stage of actually running the maps. Preservation, readout and simulation all moved at once. These are the densest six years in the field's history.

  1. 2020

    The hemibrain

    Janelia released a connectome of roughly 25,000 neurons of the fly central brain20. Industrial-scale EM reconstruction, impossible for a single lab, became the norm.

  2. 2022

    DishBrain — cultured neurons learn Pong

    Cultured brain cells learned to play Pong under closed-loop stimulation21. Biological neural computation (later commercialised as Cortical Labs' CL1) and research on embodied learning began to intersect.

  3. 2023

    The fly larva, and the end of the HBP

    The complete 3,016-neuron larval connectome was published22. Speech BCIs reached conversational rates of 60–78 words per minute. After a decade, the Human Brain Project concluded in September and handed its infrastructure to EBRAINS15.

  4. 2024

    FlyWire, H01, and the first step toward running a map

    The complete adult fly brain — 139,255 neurons and roughly 50 million synapses — was finished by FlyWire23. A 1.4-petabyte reconstruction of 1 mm³ of human cortex appeared in Science24. Shiu and colleagues showed that a spiking model of the whole fly brain reproduced taste and grooming circuit responses consistently with experiment25, and MetaWorm integrated nematode brain, body and environment26. Neuralink performed its first human implant in January. Blue Brain concluded in December after nineteen years, open-sourcing its results11. In print, The Future Loves You and Masataka Watanabe's The Neuroscience of Consciousness reopened preservation and uploading for general readers2728.

  5. 2025

    Mammalian structure plus function, and a reassessment

    MICrONS published the largest combined structure-and-activity dataset yet, covering 1 mm³ of mouse visual cortex, as a Nature collection29. Stanford and collaborators demonstrated a foundation-model "digital twin" predicting visual cortex responses30. A complete connectome of the male fly brain and ventral nerve cord — 166,000 neurons — was released31. In October, the first comprehensive reassessment since 2008, the State of Brain Emulation Report, put the sober position on record: decades away at minimum32.

  6. 2026

    An embodied fly, and a human preservation protocol

    In March, Eon Systems coupled the FlyWire connectome to a physics-simulated body (NeuroMechFly v2) and demonstrated the first embodied whole-brain emulation: walking and grooming emerged without hand-coded behaviour33. The same month, Nectome released a preprint describing whole-pig-brain preservation under a protocol compatible with physician-assisted death34. Neuralink reached 26 implants and the US BRAIN budget recovered with a 33% increase for FY202635. History connects here to Chapter 3.

1.5 Culture

Science fiction as a laboratory.

The philosophical difficulties of uploading — the copy problem, embodiment, inequality — were examined in fiction long before they appeared in journals. Here are the works that shaped each question.

YearWorkQuestion it developed
1956The City and the Stars (Clarke)Personality as stored information; the stagnation of a thousand-year city
1984Neuromancer (Gibson)Recorded personality constructs and the rights of digital beings
1994Permutation City (Egan)Subjective continuity of copies; the outer limit of computation-and-consciousness arguments
1995–Ghost in the Shell (Shirow / Oshii)The "ghost" as continuity of self; the gradualism of prosthetic and cyberbrain augmentation — decisive for how the topic is received in Japan
1998Serial Experiments LainA self distributed across a network; the boundary with physical reality
2009–Sword Art Online (Kawahara)Full-dive interfaces and the Soul Translator; the Alicization arc confronts the ethics of duplicating minds directly
2014Expelled from Paradise / TranscendenceClass structure in an uploaded society; the otherness of a posthumous upload
2016–Black Mirror: "San Junipero" / UploadLife after death in the cloud; inequality in a commercialised digital afterlife
A caveat

Fiction is a thought experiment, not a prophecy. But this field has repeatedly shown a pattern in which speculation becomes an engineering agenda a few decades later: Bernal (1929) → Moravec (1988) → the roadmap (2008). The questions fiction has organised are continuous with the philosophical arguments of Chapter 5.

1.6 Patterns

Three patterns in the record.

Chapter summary
  • Speculation led science by roughly 60 to 80 years. The 1929 conjecture (Bernal) passed through the first map (1986) and the first blueprint (2008) before becoming a laboratory problem in the 2020s.
  • Progress arrives in orders of magnitude. Complete connectomes went 302 (1986) → 3,016 (2023) → 139,255 (2024). The first order of magnitude took 37 years; the next one and a half took a year. Axes that receive automation jump exponentially; axes that do not — validation, theory — appear frozen.
  • Controversy sharpened the method. The HBP's overpromising (2013) and the Nectome affair (2018) established a norm of separating fact from extrapolation from speculation, and a culture of verifiable intermediate targets such as prizes and benchmarks. This site's editorial policy descends from that lineage.

References

Chapter 1 references (35).

  1. Bernal, J. D. (1929). The World, the Flesh and the Devil. (full-text archive)
  2. Hodgkin, A. L., & Huxley, A. F. (1952). A quantitative description of membrane current. J. Physiol., 117, 500–544.
  3. Clarke, A. C. (1956). The City and the Stars.
  4. Ettinger, R. C. W. (1964). The Prospect of Immortality. Doubleday.
  5. Martin, G. M. (1971). Brief proposal on immortality: an interim solution. Perspect. Biol. Med., 14, 339–340.
  6. White, J. G., et al. (1986). The structure of the nervous system of C. elegans. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B, 314, 1–340.
  7. Moravec, H. (1988). Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence. Harvard Univ. Press.
  8. Hanson, R. (1994). If uploads come first: the crack of a future dawn. Extropy, 6(2).
  9. Egan, G. (1994). Permutation City.
  10. Kurzweil, R. (2005). The Singularity Is Near. Viking.
  11. Blue Brain Project (2005–2024). EPFL. (concluded December 2024; results open-sourced)
  12. Sandberg, A., & Bostrom, N. (2008). Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap. FHI Technical Report #2008-3.
  13. Brain Preservation Foundation (2010–). Technology prizes and evaluation criteria.
  14. OpenWorm Project (2011–). Open-source nematode simulation.
  15. Naddaf, M. (2023). Europe spent €600 million to recreate the human brain in a computer. How did it go? Nature News Feature.
  16. McIntyre, R. L., & Fahy, G. M. (2015). Aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation. Cryobiology, 71, 448–458.
  17. Regalado, A. (2018). A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is "100 percent fatal". MIT Technology Review.
  18. Jun, J. J., et al. (2017). Fully integrated silicon probes for high-density recording of neural activity. Nature, 551, 232–236.
  19. Cook, S. J., et al. (2019). Whole-animal connectomes of both C. elegans sexes. Nature, 571, 63–71.
  20. Scheffer, L. K., et al. (2020). A connectome and analysis of the adult Drosophila central brain. eLife, 9, e57443.
  21. Kagan, B. J., et al. (2022). In vitro neurons learn and exhibit sentience when embodied in a simulated game-world. Neuron, 110, 3952–3969.
  22. Winding, M., et al. (2023). The connectome of an insect brain. Science, 379, eadd9330.
  23. Dorkenwald, S., et al. (FlyWire Consortium) (2024). Neuronal wiring diagram of an adult brain. Nature, 634, 124–138.
  24. Shapson-Coe, A., et al. (2024). A petavoxel fragment of human cerebral cortex reconstructed at nanoscale resolution. Science, 384, eadk4858.
  25. Shiu, P. K., et al. (2024). A Drosophila computational brain model reveals sensorimotor processing. Nature, 634, 210–219.
  26. Zhao, M., et al. (2024). An integrative data-driven model simulating C. elegans brain, body and environment interactions. Nat. Comput. Sci.
  27. Zeleznikow-Johnston, A. (2024). The Future Loves You: How and Why We Should Abolish Death. Penguin.
  28. Watanabe, M. (2024). The Neuroscience of Consciousness: Opening the Door to Digital Immortality. Kodansha. (in Japanese)
  29. The MICrONS Consortium (2025). Functional connectomics spanning multiple areas of mouse visual cortex. Nature, 640.
  30. Wang, E. Y., et al. (2025). Foundation model of neural activity predicts response to new stimulus types. Nature, 640.
  31. Janelia FlyEM (2025). Male CNS Connectome (brain + ventral nerve cord, 166,000 neurons).
  32. Zanichelli, N., Schons, M., Freeman, I., Shiu, P. K., & Arkhipov, A. (2025). State of Brain Emulation Report 2025. arXiv:2510.15745.
  33. Eon Systems (2026). How the Eon team produced a virtual embodied fly. (announced 7 March 2026)
  34. Nectome Research (2026). Ultrastructural preservation of a whole large mammal brain. (preprint)
  35. The Transmitter (2026). Neuroscience, BRAIN Initiative gain budget in NIH funding bill.