An unfelt surprise upon being uploaded into the cloud
Reading | Neuroscience
Christof Koch, PhD | 2025-09-26
In this thought experiment mixed with science fiction and serious futurism, eminent neuroscientist Dr. Christof Koch sketches a not-so-distant future in which we will be tempted by the promise of eternal life in an AI cloud. With the fluidity of a novelist, he brings to life this felt temptation, in all its force, just to smash it towards the end. This essay is a critical warning to us all, an attempt to have us confront the problem before we are actually faced with it, so we can protect ourselves with the light of reason.
The ads are everywhere – Live forever! Escape death!
The catch? You must die first! Neuroscientists still can’t reconstruct a brain without destroying it. To reach the company’s luxury-grade Shangri-La in the Sky®, you swap your flesh and blood brain for a digital copy. There’s no free lunch; risky, but definitely worth it. I’ll gladly trade the ravages of age and disease for a quasi-eternal life in an engineered paradise. Ironic: “Avatar” once meant a god taking mortal form. I’m taking the reverse route – a mortal angling for the divine.
I’ve spoken to Bob and Paul who already transitioned. They look and talk just like I remember them. Their avatars are insightful concerning their experiences and speak eloquently about their new life. Do they have any regrets leaving flesh and bone behind? If they do, they never mention any. Bob put it succinctly “Are you kidding me! There is no question that I see, hear, I sense my body move, I feel my limbs, I am content or sad, anxious or relaxed, have a sense of self, just like before. I’m ecstatic at having left the old, analog world with all its strife and toxic politics behind. Here it’s all play and no work.” Paul, a notorious womanizer back in the meat world, enthused about the sex, but also the stunning scenery, music, drugs, and parties. Their zeal is a bit eerie—cultish, even—but persuasive.
Boredom seems possible but so is anything else – racing cars or space crafts, exploring alien planets, hunting dinosaurs, war games, single-person shooters, whatever has been imagined and can be programmed in hyper-realistic style, it’s right here. No need for sleep either; best of all, if you die, the system automatically reboots you! Who wouldn’t give everything for such a life…
The procedure: anesthesia, followed by a painless brain death via cryogenic flush. An atomic beam will slice my brain into slivers thinner than light, each layer imaged with an electron microscope and stitched into a wiring diagram of my ninety billion nerve cells, and all their interconnections, with every synapse weighted. This billion-terabyte connectome will then be animated with life inside a vast biophysical simulation – with all my memories, habits, quirks, personality and, they promise, consciousness, intact.
I remember when reconstructed digital mice first appeared. Neurotechnologists perfected the tools of their macabre trade on them until they improved to the point that companion dogs and cats could be saved in this manner. Their owners swore that they were the real thing. When the first pioneering humans with terminal diseases were uploaded, the outcomes were at first grotesque, resembling Dante’s vision of hell juxtaposed onto a medieval mad house. Yet, eventually, progress in more refined reconstruction techniques and advanced digital psychiatry eliminated most of the bugs and the costs came radically down.
Safe and affordable connectome reconstructions and simulations triggered the great migration, as first the super-rich, followed by the well-to-do journeyed to the cloud. And now me!
My cancer will kill me within months. Laura urges me to go now—before tumors or dementia wreck my brain and my connectome is corrupted. Your avatar is only as sharp as the original! We’ve signed the papers and mortgaged our home to cover the cloud fees, pay for secure storage (you wouldn’t want your essence to be hacked) and to keep my simulation running in real time. Nobody wants to interact with an avatar who takes minutes to answer “yes” or “no.”
Skeptics claim that these digital avatars won’t feel anything, won’t be conscious. All you’ll get is a public spectacle of words and motion but nothing on the inside. Of course, religious folks believe that an immaterial and immortal soul is needed. Various carbon chauvinists insist that consciousness needs biology and can’t be replicated in silicon. Advocates of something called integrated information theory claim that consciousness isn’t computable in the cloud. That digital computers can do everything we can do but won’t be what we are – sentient. Whatever! I don’t buy it. Philosophers never agree on anything anyhow! I trust the engineers. Just talk to the uploaded about their feelings. They’ve convinced me.
Now it’s here. A white room, soft music. I’m super-pumped to see what life as an avatar feels like. The technician starts the infusion. My eyelids grow heavy. Talk to you on the other side.
. . .
Postscript
Laura is enthusiastic about Harry’s avatar: “Trust me, I’ve lived with him for a lifetime. This is the real McCoy, the genuine article.” She plans to join Harry soon.
And so, humanity uploaded, one by one, preserving all the action but none of the feelings.
Epilogue
According to the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of consciousness, even an anatomically and physiologically accurate computer simulation of a human brain running on conventional digital computer would never feel anything. It would act and speak like a person, but without any experiences. This can be rigorously proven, using the axioms and postulates of IIT, as the cause-effect powers of a brain, which is essentially what conscious experience is, are not replicated by digital von Neumann machines along the lines built today. Thus, uploading it is a road to literally nowhere. For the proof and discussion, see “Dissociating Artificial Intelligence from Artificial Consciousness;” for an overview, see chapter 13 in The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness is Widespread but Can’t Be Computed.
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