Ethics of brain emulations

Ethics of brain emulations Whole brain emulation attempts to achieve software intelligence by copying the function of biological nervous systems into software. This paper aims at giving an overview of the ethical issues of the brain emulation approach, and analyse how they should affect responsible policy for developing the field. Animal emulations have uncertain moral status, and a principle of analogy is proposed for judging treatment of virtual animals. Various considerations of developing and using human brain emulations are discussed. Introduction Whole brain emulation (WBE) is an approach to achieve software intelligence by copying the functional structure of biological nervous systems into software. Rather than attempting to understand the high-level processes underlying perception, action, emotions and intelligence, the approach assumes that they would emerge from a sufficiently close imitation of the low-level neural functions, even if this is done through a software process. (Sandberg 2013) of brain emulations have been discussed, little analysis of the ethics of the project so far has been done. The main questions of this paper are to what extent brain emulations are moral patients, and what new ethical concerns are introduced as a result of brain emulation technology. The basic idea is to take a particular brain, scan its structure in detail at some resolution, construct a software model of the physiology that is so faithful to the original that, when run on appropriate hardware, it will have an internal causal structure that is essentially the same as the original brain. All relevant functions on some level of description are present, and higher level functions supervene from these. While at present an unfeasibly ambitious challenge, the necessary computing power and various scanning methods are rapidly developing. Large scale computational brain models are a very active research area, at present reaching the size of mammalian nervous systems. al. 2012) WBE can be viewed as the logical endpoint of current trends in computational neuroscience and systems biology. Obviously the eventual feasibility depends on a number of philosophical issues (physicalism, functionalism, non-organicism) and empirical facts (computability, scale separation, detectability, scanning and simulation tractability) that cannot be predicted beforehand; WBE can be viewed as a program trying to test them empirically. (Sandberg 2013) Early projects are likely to merge data from multiple brains and studies, attempting to show that this can produce a sufficiently rich model to produce nontrivial behaviour but not attempting to emulate any particular individual. However, …