Neuroscientist here, first time on this board and of course I'm disappointed. None of you are even read on the topic.
First, a primer for digitizing brains. Yes, it's possible, because neurons having on/off states (and a few others, but for simplicity just consider on/off) On states affect neighboring neurons in predictable ways, such that they will then either be on/off too. Assembling a complete map of every possible interaction between a complete nervous system is called a "connectome". We have accomplished this in ONE extremely simple organism, C. Elegans.
Here is what it looks like running as software:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHg6CQN5Y2gAnd here's what it looks like running as the nervous system of a robot:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWQnzylhgHcSo scale that up an unfathomable amount, and you could have a human brain running in software.
We have on other practical problem which I think is well demonstrated in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x790AjID0FA&t=625swhich is that when your brain is digitized it's a copy of you, NOT you. To the digitized brain, it would appear as if your mode of existence suddenly shifted, but to the flesh and bone you nothing would change. You would still die, and vanish into nothing. THAT is a problem.
So, how do we solve this problem? Instead of creating the copy, we gradually replace the brain with immortal synthetic neurons that run in the matter of our little worm robot. The idea that YOU are YOU is really an illusion that your brain creates, the victory here is fooling your brain as its being replaced such that it actually believes the copy is still you. Do we have the technology for this? Fuck no, not in the next 20 years. Making a copy that runs on a computer, I'm sure we'll see that before we die. But a full blown replacement... No. We're all doomed.
