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My thinking on mind uploading has shifted quite a bit this year. It started when I read Dr Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston’s book The Future Loves You: How and Why We Should Abolish Death (we also had him on the podcast).

The book clarified several things for me. It made me more optimistic about the practical feasibility of cryonics. But it also forced me to revisit a belief I’ve held for a long time.

The standard picture of mind uploading - if anything in this domain can be called “standard” - goes something like this:

Problem solved: the person now lives on in digital form.

For many people - my past me included - the immediate reaction is: wait a second, that’s obviously not you. That’s a copy. But Zeleznikow-Johnston challenges this intuition. His argument, as I understand it, is that the same logic that tells you “the uploaded version isn’t me” would also force you to question whether you are the same person who woke up this morning. You were unconscious for hours, with no phenomenal continuity, yet you don’t treat the waking version as a replica.

I’m not going to unpack the full philosophical machinery here (tempting as it might be). This is just a preface to make two points:

Which brings me to why I’m writing this now. By coincidence, these ideas cropped up twice last week.

First, I listened to a talk by Masataka Watanabe, Associate Professor of Systems Innovation at the University of Tokyo. His group is exploring radical brain–machine interfaces and the possibility of merging biological and artificial hemispheres over time.

Almost simultaneously, at an event in Palo Alto, Max Hodak, co-founder of Neuralink and now CEO at Science Corp., described brain–computer interfaces as a “longevity-adjacent story.” According to TechCrunch, he told the audience that around 2035 things will start to get “weird” - that “patient number one” might face a choice: “die of pancreatic cancer, or you can be inserted into the matrix and then it will accelerate from there”.

Yes, I realize you might need a minute to process to that. Come back when you’re ready to continue.

Okay, let’s begin with Masataka Watanabe’s vision.

Watanabe is attempting something different than the usual sci-fi sketch of uploading. He isn’t talking about taking a snapshot of a brain, shutting down the biological version, and booting up a digital replica. His ambition is to splice a machine into the brain’s existing communication channels, let the biological and artificial systems coexist, and then let the artificial one take over gradually.

To understand why, you need to know the bottleneck he’s trying to escape: almost all current brain–computer interfaces try to talk directly to the cortex - the “processor.” But the cortex is dense and highly recurrent, like a looping network. With today’s implants, recording from small local populations is feasible, but electrical stimulation is much harder to localize: it tends to recruit many neurons and passing fibers, so “writing” is usually coarser and less predictable than “reading”.

Watanabe is pessimistic that conventional cortical electrode arrays will ever deliver the neuron-level, bidirectional control required for his endgame: a machine system that can genuinely plug in as a hemisphere.

That’s why he’s targeting the “cables”, not the “processors”. Specifically, the corpus callosum - the large bundle of axons carrying spikes between the two hemispheres. Axons behave more like individual wires: a spike travels only down that wire, not sideways into neighbouring cells. If you can intercept that traffic at the point where hundreds of millions of these wires cross, he argues, you can achieve clean, high-bandwidth control that cortical implants can’t match.

Watanabe says his lab has already demonstrated early pieces of this in animals, including recording signals from the brain’s inter-hemispheric fibre bundles. They’re also exploring ways for neurons to form stable connections with engineered metal surfaces. The long-term idea is to place an ultra-dense interface in the corpus callosum and connect it to a large artificial neural system - a kind of external “machine hemisphere” - whose structure is informed by human brain wiring data.

Once that works, the next phase is the part that matters for consciousness and identity. The biological and artificial hemispheres would run in parallel for months or years. Memories would be rehearsed and consolidated on both sides. Hidden or forgotten memories - such as those still influencing behaviour - could be coaxed out with stimulation. Over time, more of the thinking, perceiving, and remembering shifts to the artificial side, until the biological hemisphere is no longer needed. Eventually, the machine hemisphere could be disconnected entirely, yet - on Watanabe’s account - your subjective experience would never have had to “jump.” It would just continue.

This is, of course, the Ship of Theseus revisited: if you replace the planks one by one over long periods of time, is it the same ship? Many people tolerate gradual replacement more easily than the abrupt scan-and-kill scenario. But the identity problem doesn’t magically disappear. If you believe the instantaneous version produces a mere copy, then a slow, continuous transition might still, at the end, yield a copy - just one assembled incrementally. Watanabe’s answer is that what matters is not the material but the continuity of function and experience: the two hemispheres co-producing a single conscious point of view throughout the transition. If that continuity never breaks, he considers the endpoint still to be “you.”

And I agree. If that familiar, first-person sense is still there - what it feels like to be Peter - I doubt I would question my identity at all.*

* At least once the initial strangeness wore off. If there were to be any change of physical form it would likely be pretty disorienting at first, but that probably feels closer to adapting to a life-altering injury than to becoming someone else.

Watanabe’s timelines are surprisingly concrete. During the talk I attended, he suggested that building the full non-human prototype - where a macaque hemisphere is gradually replaced by an artificial one - could take about ten years if he had something like an Allen-Institute-scale operation behind it. A medical proof-of-concept, using a smaller version of the interface for a clinical indication, might be five years. Human uploading, if ever, follows after that. Whether this is realistic is a separate question; the point is that he has an engineering-style roadmap, not a philosophical thought experiment.

Max Hodak, meanwhile, is approaching the same mountain from a very different side. His company, Science Corp, isn’t proposing to replace hemispheres or map individual axons. Their near-term goals look almost conventional: restoring vision with retinal implants and optogenetic gene therapies. That part is already in human trials. But beneath that practical façade is a longer arc. Hodak has been explicit that the real game is biohybrid BCIs: devices containing engineered neurons grown in vitro, which are then implanted onto the cortex so that they extend their own axons and dendrites into the host brain. The brain accepts these cells as native tissue. They integrate. They become part of the circuit.

If this works - and to be clear, it is still very early - the interface no longer looks like a piece of alien metal. It is a fusion of biological and engineered components, scalable, biocompatible, and capable of forming millions of connections naturally. That is Hodak’s answer to the same scaling problem Watanabe is struggling with. He rejects the idea that we’ll ever control enough cortical neurons with metal electrodes. But instead of hijacking the white-matter cables, he wants to grow new processors and cables, in situ, that can bridge the gap between biological cognition and other substrates.

He tends to speak less about uploading and more about redrawing the borders of a mind: adding new computational areas, expanding subjective capacity, or merging minds and machines so seamlessly that the line blurs. But the destination resembles Watanabe’s in broad outline: engineered consciousness, substrate independence, and a future where some form of “migration” might coexist with conventional medicine.

When Hodak frames BCIs as a “longevity-adjacent story,” and imagines a 2035 scenario where a terminal patient chooses between death and entering some engineered cognitive environment, he is gesturing toward the same horizon Watanabe is marching toward - just with a very different toolset and philosophy of how to get there.

What makes ideas like these worth taking seriously is not that mind uploading suddenly looks easy, but that several enabling technologies are moving in parallel.

One is brain–computer interfaces themselves. For decades, BCIs were limited to tiny numbers of channels and short-term experiments. That’s changed. Electrode density, materials, and long-term stability have improved to the point where recording from thousands of channels for years is now realistic, not hypothetical. Even if “writing” remains the hard part, the basic ability to tap into large-scale neural traffic - and to do so chronically - is no longer science fiction.

A second is the emergence of more cell-specific ways of “writing” to the nervous system. Electrical stimulation is powerful, but it tends to spread and recruit unintended neurons and fibres. Approaches like gene therapy and optogenetics point to a different paradigm: make particular cell types responsive to light or other targeted triggers, and you gain a cleaner control channel. Retinal gene therapies are now approved treatments, and optogenetic vision-restoration trials combine gene delivery with wearable light-projection systems.

A third foundation is the combination of better brain mapping and stronger machine-side modelling. Large-scale neural simulations used to be confined to small, proof-of-concept models; today, building and training complex dynamical systems is feasible at research scale. At the same time, brain-mapping efforts - from cell atlases to increasingly detailed wiring maps - are steadily improving our ability to describe what the brain is built from and how it is connected. Spiking neural networks, neuromorphic hardware, and brain-inspired models are still crude compared to biology, but the gap is narrowing in ways that matter for Watanabe’s proposal: you can more plausibly imagine a large artificial system that can be trained, tuned, and coupled to a living brain in a closed loop, rather than a static “upload” that simply gets switched on.

Before this year, I hadn’t paid much attention to mind uploading. It always felt a step too speculative even for me: an interesting philosophical puzzle, perhaps, but not something that seemed anchored to real technical trajectories. Now, for the first time, I find myself paying attention - not because I’m convinced, but because the questions are no longer easy to dismiss.