One of the greatest forever unresolved philosophical questions: What is reality? will get a whole lot more complex if Ken Hayworth’s perspective on the logical conclusion to his work is attained. Hayworth’s work: brain mapping. The proposed logical conclusion: mind uploading.

Brain mapping is the charting of the entire circuitry of a brain at the nanometer scale. The first organism to have a complete 3D brain map is the caenorhabditis elegans, a tiny roundworm with 302 neurons in its entire brain that create 7000 connections. The human brain has 100 billion neurons.

In current brain mapping technology, a brain first needs to be fixed with toxic chemicals that preserve the brain– but not in a way geared toward a possible reanimation of tissue, as in cryonics. The preserved brain is plastically embedded, then sliced, and sliced some more until each section is small and thin enough for every single synapse to be captured by high resolution microscopy. Right now this technology would have to be scaled up 100 million times to map a human brain at the nanometer scale, a feat scientists feel will take several more decades to achieve.

Mind uploading is the process of transferring the contents of an individual’s biological mind, including: memories, consciousness and personality traits… to another substrate, such as a computer.

There are countless ways human brain mapping will help humanity, notably for understanding and combating neurological disorders. But Hayworth’s ultimate goal of mind uploading pushes the research into the realm of a post-human possibility, a place few scientists have opened their own minds to.

Hayworth may be the real life Will Caster of Transcendence, however his deduced logical conclusion is still the stuff of science fiction – for now.

To learn more, check out part 2 of the Ken Hayworth series at Galactic Public Archives.

“The mind is everything. What you think, you become.” – Buddha