A new paper from Nick Bostrom about the scientific research required for whole brain emulation. Its a little technical, but still interesting.
Whole Brain Emulation A Roadmap (PDF)
The concept of brain emulation
Whole brain emulation, often informally called “uploading” or “downloading”, has been the
subject of much science fiction and also some preliminary studies (see appendix D for history
and previous work). The basic idea is to take a particular brain, scan its structure in detail,
and construct a software model of it that is so faithful to the original that, when run on
appropriate hardware, it will behave in essentially the same way as the original brain.
Emulation and simulation
The term emulation originates in computer science, where it denotes mimicking the function
of a program or computer hardware by having its low‐level functions simulated by another
program. While a simulation mimics the outward results, an emulation mimics the internal
causal dynamics (at some suitable level of description). The emulation is regarded as
successful if the emulated system produces the same outward behaviour and results as the
original (possibly with a speed difference). This is somewhat softer than a strict mathematical
definition1.
