Elon Musk has a company that claims they'll have a working brain chip implant this year. Imagine having one since birth that records every electrical impulse your brain has ever made.
Yeah, Neuralink. I had the same thought as well. What does recording the brain waves gives us though? We want to emulate the behavior of a person through software by mapping inputs (sensory data) to outputs (actions: speech, movement). It's not clear how knowing the intermediate brain state would help us do that. Instead of going directly from sensory data to movement, we'd be going from sensory data to brain state to movement. Does the extra step help us simplify the model, or does it just add an unnecessary step that can be skipped? I don't know enough about computer learning, so I didn't mention it.
I suppose you'd have to debate philosophy to answer what makes you, you. What is the soul? Are you just a set of experiences and memories? If you're just a set of neuropathways created from experience you could theoretically create the same neuropathways in a new body.
I've seen no evidence that the matter in our brains obeys different laws of physics than the rest of the universe, so the brain is just the physical configuration of matter. Free will does not exist in the sense that people think it exists. The problem is getting that configuration into a computer. Just your brain alone has something like 1023 atoms, making up trillions of cells. Even if we could map all the connections in the brain down to the cellular level, each cell is a very complex machine full of logic and memory. Just because there is a connection between two cells doesn't mean we know how the two cells interact. So the black box of inputs and outputs that I propose is the simplest solution. Perhaps a hybrid solution can be developed that takes high res brain scans and those of brain electrical activity and integrates them all together to create a more accurate model.
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