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The old human aspiration to conquer death is taking a new, technological form. We attempted immortality in art, legacy, or religion for thousands of years. Nowadays, more and more futurists, neuroscientists, and technologists are convinced that the secret to immortality is not in the body, but in the mind. They are racing to do the possibly holy grail of the digital era: mapping human consciousness onto a digital form, transferring someone's mind—his or her memories, personality, and identity—into a computer body so he or she can live on forever. This notion, or "mind uploading" or "whole brain emulation," is an area that merges cutting-edge science with intense philosophical exploration of the nature of identity, consciousness, and what it means to be human.

The technical path to mind uploading is as daunting as it is fascinating. The strongest theory is based on a principle known as "substrate independence." That is, the human mind is not some sort of magical object, but rather the result of a specific computational design—the brain's complex network of about 86 billion neurons and their trillions of synapse connections. If consciousness is a product of this physical pattern and activity of its electrical and chemical processes, then in theory it ought to be possible to recreate the pattern on some other "substrate," or material foundation, like the silicon on a computer chip. Here, the mind is software and the brain is hardware. The aim of uploading is to replicate carefully the software and execute it on new, more long-lasting hardware.

The process would start with an extremely high-resolution map of a person's brain. The most widely debated way of doing it is with equipment that isn't yet available on the scale needed: high-definition brain scanning. One theory for how to do it is a type of advanced electron microscopy. The brain, or a dead brain preserved after death, would be infused with a preservative and stained with heavy metals to make the neurons appear. It would be cut into thousands of exquisitely thin sections—thinner than a human hair. Each slice would be photographed by a computer-controlled electron microscope, creating a vast library of pictures revealing each neuron, synapse, and connection. This enormous body of information, an entire "connectome" of the brain, would be the raw blueprint of an individual's mind.

The second half is the real engineering problem. This three-dimensional mapping of neurons must be converted into a functioning computational system. With supercomputers and advanced software, researchers would attempt to simulate the operation of this virtual brain. They would need to replicate not only the structure, but also the intricate electrochemical vocabulary that neurons use. The simulation must be accurate enough that computational neurons fire in the same sequence as their biological kin, generating the same flow of information that gives rise to thought, memory, and feeling. If successful, the simulation would theoretically "awaken" as a conscious digital entity, an identical copy of the original person's mind.

The possible applications spurring this competition are staggering. The enthusiasts envision a utopia where disease, accident, or old age-induced death is a thing of the past. Wishes for immortal digital life in a virtual reality paradise free of the limitations of the physical body entice us. It might be backed up from time to time, such that no memory ever existed. You might travel across the galaxy as a data stream or be in several places simultaneously. Beyond individual immortality, computer minds might perhaps find solutions to problems that stumped biological brains and propel science and culture at cosmic speeds. For others, it is the natural next step in human evolution: abandoning our vulnerable biological flesh for a species of pure information.

But the philosophical and ethical issues are as daunting as the technical ones. The most well-known is the "copying problem." You upload and copy your brain. Have you actually moved into the computer, or have you merely made a replica of yourself? Your natural, original self would remain (at least until the time of death). The virtual duplicate would think it is you, with your life up to the point that the scan takes place, but the continuation of your own personal consciousness would most likely go on in your natural body. It is not relocating to a new house; it is creating a twin. This begs a haunting question: would uploading be suicide for the original consciousness, with a resulting creation of a virtual imposter?

Secondly, the quality of this virtual existence is extremely greatly in doubt. Consciousness is not computation with information; it is subjective experience, or "qualia"—the sheer sensory feel of the color red, the taste of chocolate, the pain of sorrow. We can't possibly know for sure whether a simulated brain, even one that was fully flawless, would produce this inner light of consciousness. It might be a "philosophical zombie," a creature that behaves and speaks exactly as if it were conscious but is actually only operating a highly sophisticated program with no inner experience whatsoever. We could never possibly know whether it was conscious from the outside.

The societal repercussions are just as deep. Would digital life forms have a right to the law? Would they be ownable, erasable, or forced to labor? The threat of injustice casts a shadow: a future in which the ultra-rich have digital immortality, but the rest of human life is mortal. It also introduces new kinds of existential risk. An online mind might be hacked into, tortured, or duplicated ad infinitum over its objections. The whole idea of personal identity would be annihilated if you could have multiple slightly different versions of yourself all simultaneously existing.

The competition to digitize consciousness is, at least for the time being, a competition of theory and baby steps. We are acquiring the ability to map the fundamental connectomes of little worms, and we can model tiny cohorts of neurons. But the human brain is orders of magnitude more complex. Computation and data storage necessary to model it are beyond our reach. Scanning technology for capturing its details without destroying it does not yet exist.

Ultimately, this is not a war of technology. It is a scientific, modern re-definition of humanity's age-old questionings. What is the soul? What is the self? The search challenges us to clarify what we hold important in our lives. Is it the unbroken continuity of our own individual experience, or is it the information pattern that defines us? The. Immortality fantasy in a machine is strong, but it comes with a warning. In hurrying to shed the weaknesses of the body, we risk discarding the only part that infuses life with worth: its terminus, fleshiness, and impermanence. The competition has already begun, but not in the line of a technological advance, but in an inner understanding of ourselves.

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