(A response to a post about the impossibilty of copying a human brain at https://onezero.medium.com/we-cant-upload-you-sorry-5c3c85f47766)

"They all come down to the same thing: a connectome is a static thing, a snapshot of the brain’s wiring at the instant it was captured. The brain is not a static thing. It is dynamic.."

Sure. Which means that "you" change all the time. Given that, what difference does it make when you take a snapshot? It doesn't.

"Point to point wiring, the connectome, gives us none of this, none of these properties of the neuron, and never can"

Right. And we "never" could do many things that we now do with ease. Just because we can't capture all the details now doesn't mean we never can.

"Doing such a reconstruction of 1 trillion synapses is, to put it mildly, unfeasible."

Many calculations I can do on my iPhone today would have been infeasible to my grandfather. He spent weeks calculating engineering tasks that take seconds today.

"Yet knowing how often a synapse fails is essential to accurately simulating a given piece of your brain."

But do we have to accurately mirror all this to simulate "you"? You don't know that and no one else does either. What "you" experience might only require modeling a far smaller subset of cells.

"To know you, we need to be able to simulate this infinite recursion of spikes; and to do that we’d need to recapitulate your entire development, from the moment your first spikes appeared."

You don't know that, either. If I see a stone that has been shaped by the pounding of waves, I do not need to know anything more than its current shape.

"So I’m sorry to break it to you, but it turns out we can’t upload your mind to a computer because you are not, in the slightest, defined by the wiring between your neurons. "

And you most definitely don't know that.

You haven't even defined what we might (someday) be hoping to accomplish here. Is it immortality or preservation of knowledge and intelligence? I'd say immortality might be achieved by connecting artificial neurons that take over for biological cells. A tiny machine that monitors one neuron until it is ready to mimic and replace it. Then it invades and takes over. Far out stuff now, but might be quite easy someday. Someday, of course. Not now, not in any time frame I can imagine. But someday.

But a copy of a brain is just a copy, no matter how good. A copy might be useful for preserving knowledge and intelligence; the "you" in the copy might think itself you, but it won't be.