Main topic: Personal identity and whole brain emulation (WBE)

Whole Brain Emulation (WBE) is the logical endpoint of current work in computational neuroscience and connectomics: computational one-to-one models of entire brains. While full WBE is still decades away, progress in brain-mapping and brain/body simulation is ongoing. Whether it can actually be achieved remains to be seen, but it poses important philosophical, neuroscientific and ethical questions worth investigating well before it occurs. In particular, it and related neurotechnologies bring up questions about personal identity, conscious experience, and the ethics of experiments on artificial neural systems.