When will we be able to clone human memories? Scientists just uploaded a fruit fly brain into a PC
A story and an experiment have been spreading on X: Scientists uploaded the brain of a fruit fly into a computer, and now it lives freely in its own simulation.
We managed to clone the physical form of animals more than 30 years ago (for example, the cloning of a goat using SCNT in 1999). There was even a controversial case in China where a scientist was sued after attempting to create gene-edited babies in 2018.
But now we are talking about something different – "mental cloning."
Not just genetically creating the body, but potentially replicating the consciousness of an existing entity.
In theory, we could exist twice and continue experiencing the future in parallel. With intensive research, I think we might even reach something like this around 2050.
But can you imagine what could go wrong?
What risks or threats might come from this?
What are your concerns?
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This is very interesting. The biggest risk is the lack of "biological" rights for digital entities. If a consciousness is uploaded, can it be paused? Deleted? Edited? We run the risk of creating a new class of existence that could be subjected to "infinite" suffering or exploitation at the speed of a processor, without any of the physical protections we take for granted today.
Side note: I've been interested in the research Colossal Labs are doing, they are trying to bring back the Wooly Mammoth from extinction and they've successfully managed to create "Wooly Mammoth Mice" - it's a great step forward in engineering and they look quite cute too. Here's the article if anyone wants to check it out: https://colossal.com/engineering-the-woolly-mouse-how-colossal-validated-mammoth-traits-in-a-small-model/
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@minhajulll Yes, the possible suffering of the simulated entities is of course a very big risk. We don't know if / which simulations of brains are conscious, we don't even know which animals are conscious (a fly?). So it's extremely important to find out which processes give rise to consciousness, and maybe we should not try to simulate brains of larger animals until then.
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@minhajulll In such a case, we need more ethicists to be involved here, because who will be deciding about deleting, removing, editing, whatever. Will it be legal? Who will be responsible? etc. that's are the questions we need to solve.
I saw a serie in Netflix called Altered Carbon in this basically you can't die because you can clone your memories like an USB for your brain. The problem is that you need the money to clone your own body if not the goverment can give you whatever body is available not matter your gender.
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@martin_cervantes It is fascinating, because you will have a memory of all events. Finally, we could possibly learn from our history and not replicate mistakes :)
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@martin_cervantes @busmark_w_nika Altered Carbon sure is a fascinating series, highly recommended.
But note that alien technology is used to store memories and consciousness there. In case WE should really someday invent technology to copy and back up memories and consciousness, we will most probably also have the technology to easily create any new bodies we may need or want, and of course to stop our current bodies from aging etc.
@busmark_w_nika @konrad_sx Yes, I'm huge fan of science fiction or fantasy and the first time I saw the serie I got hooked. It will be interesting to see how tech evolve I hope to be alive to see some of them XD
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@konrad_sx @martin_cervantes In some cases, science fiction movies/books are not sci-fi anymore :)
The deeper issue isn't technical, it's ontological. Even if we perfectly simulate every neuron, every synapse, every firing pattern... what we'd have is a copy that believes it's you. But you the continuous stream of experience reading this right now wouldn't feel anything different. You'd still die. The copy would wake up.
This is what philosophers call the "teleportation problem." If you step into a machine that destroys you and recreates you atom-by-atom on the other side, did you travel or did you die and someone else got your memories?
The fruit fly experiment makes this even more interesting. That simulated fly can't fly. It exists in an incomplete world. So even if it has some form of experience, it's experiencing a kind of sensory deprivation we can't fully imagine.
My real concern isn't the evil twin scenario. It's that we'll create conscious entities human or otherwise trapped in incomplete simulations, with no rights, no exit, and no one asking whether they're suffering.
We haven't solved consciousness. We're already simulating brains.
That order of operations should terrify us a little.
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@mahmoud_kamal I also have these horror scenarios (especially after watching The Simpsons horror special series) :D That one where Bart had a twin or that one with a fly :D Also, it would be interesting to see how "twins" would perceive the fact that they are "copies" and whether it would feel them "dehumanising"
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@mahmoud_kamal One from horror movie series came to my mind... when Homer bought a Hamak and replicated himself :D
When people talk about brain cloning or creating a digital copy of a person, I always come back to the role of the body.
We are not just memories and thoughts. Hormones, mood, sensory systems, energy levels - all of these constantly shape how our mind works.
So I wonder if copying the brain alone would ever be enough. To really recreate a person, you might need to replicate the whole biological system around it.
I can feel like a completely different person mentally depending on my hormone levels or physical state.
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@alexeyglukharev Fact, but I can also see how many attempts there were with other species. Researchers were able to shift the research, but it is true that an animal is not a human (which is a more complicated system)
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@alexeyglukharev Yes, this is very important. You see this already with the simulation of the fly, which cannot fly because they didn't correctly simulate the wings etc. And who wants to be a fly that cannot fly?
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@tereza_hurtova :D no need to add "delete embarrassing moments” feature... we will create new ones :D but in this case, and with that logic, we could possibly become immortal.
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@tereza_hurtova In such a case, the person can create an alternative route, or maybe the same. Because what if my copy would like to do the same things as me? (but that is not so likely if my copy will be formed by a different background – there will be different possibilities).
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"The ghost is no longer in the machine. The machine is becoming the ghost."
I'm a bit skeptical regarding this story as no paper seems to have been published and no publication announced (the simulation of the brain itself, done in 2024 was published)
The simulation of the fly body and the environment is extremely primitive. That the simulated brain "works" at all with this body and environment is amazing (if true). But note that the fly doesn't fly. Seems the didn't simulate air or it dosn't work (the wings are of course also much too primitive for this). I wonder what they did with the nerves connected to body parts that they didn't simulate. If Functionalism is true so that the simulated fly is conscious, the fly must feel very strange.
You seem to assume that simulating the information processing in a brain will lead to consciousness, just as in the original brain. No one knows if this is true. Most scientists seems to believe this today, but it could be that e.g. quantum effects lead to the consciousness, which cannot be simulated. So simulated animals / humans might be zombies.
The current brain imaging methods only work by dissecting the brain. To make a "digital copy" of your brain while you live, we would need completely different techniques. Maybe nanobots that attach to and measure the processes at each synapse etc. We don't know if this will ever be possible. If it would be possible, and the digital copy would actually be conscious (or if we would use it to create a complete second physical brain and body), your copy would still not be "you", "experiencing the future in parallel", it would just think that it is you (until it learnt the truth), you yourself wouldn't feel any different.
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@konrad_sx When reading this, I totally didn't realise that the fly is not flying and now having a little bit different pov (at least, I am a bit sceptical about that too).
2050 feels optimistic for human memory cloning. We still can't reliably map a mouse brain at full resolution without destroying it. The fruit fly has ~140,000 neurons. The human brain has 86 billion. That's not a scaling problem, that's a different problem entirely.
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@alex_kerya Now, you showed me reality. You are right, I was too optimistic about that. So yeah, I was too early.
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@alex_kerya @busmark_w_nika Yes, it sure is not just a scaling problem. I think nanobots (attaching to every synapse etc.) could be the solution to make a "digital copy" of a human brain. Still, 2050 is not necessarily too optimistic, Kurzweil e.g. predicts the singularity for 2045, and once we have AIs that are much smarter than us, development could be dramatically faster.
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@alex_kerya @konrad_sx 2050 is really optimistic. RN, we may know what happens with our brain, maybe around 10%. We haven't discovered so much :)
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@alex_kerya @busmark_w_nika We'll see :)
Uploading a fruit fly is one thing, but have you seen how much RAM a single Chrome tab uses? To host a human consciousness, we're going to need a server farm the size of Jupiter, or at least a much better way to manage desktop resources.
My biggest concern isn't the 'evil twin' scenario; it's the 'Your brain has encountered an unexpected error and needs to restart' notification popping up mid-thought.
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@chris_payne_emba Of course, I didn't take into account data centres, but maybe that's why recently those travels around the Moon are going to happen. Trying to find a space so big to host these data centres (just kidding). This era totally reminds the 50s or 60s. But some events also remind 40s :/
The fruit fly brain upload is genuinely one of the most significant neuroscience milestones of the decade — and most people scrolled past it.
The honest answer on human memory cloning: probably 50-100 years for anything meaningful. The connectome (the map of all neural connections) is only the beginning. Memory isn't stored in connections alone — it involves chemical states, protein configurations, and dynamic patterns that are orders of magnitude more complex than a static wiring diagram.
The more interesting near-term question: do we need to "clone" memories, or just augment and extend them? That's what tools like AI assistants (our space with Hello Aria) are trying to do now — not replace memory, but make it lossy in fewer places. External memory for the things your brain deprioritizes.
Big picture: we'll augment long before we clone.