Редактирование: Whole brain emulation (раздел)

= History =

The origin of WBE can be traced to [[J.D. Bernal]]'s 1929 book ''The World, The Flesh, The Devil'', although the idea is more about gradual replacement as opposed to the traditional [[Whole Brain Emulation#Microtome Procedure|slice-and-dice method]]. The following quote was previously reproducing in the WBE Roadmap:

<blockquote>''Men will not be content to manufacture life: they will want to improve on it. For one material out of which nature has been forced to make life, man will have a thousand; living and organized material will be as much at the call of the mechanized or compound man as metals are to‐day, and gradually this living material will come to substitute more and more for such inferior functions of the brain as memory, reflex actions, etc., in the compound man himself; for bodies at this time would be left far behind. The brain itself would become more and more separated into different groups of cells or individual cells with complicated connections, and probably occupying considerable space. This would mean loss of motility which would not be a disadvantage owing to the extension of the sense faculties. Every part would not be accessible for replacing or repairing and this would in itself ensure a practical eternity of existence, for even the replacement of a previously organic brain‐cell by a synthetic apparatus would not destroy the continuity of consciousness.''
... 
''Finally, consciousness itself may end or vanish in a humanity that has become completely etherealized, losing the close‐knit organism, becoming masses of atoms in space communicating by radiation, and ultimately perhaps resolving itself entirely into light.''
</blockquote>

The first real paper on WBE was Merkle's 1989 paper ''Large Scale Analysis of Neural Structures'', in which he predicted that "a complete analysis of the cellular connectivity of a structure as large as the human brain is only a few decades away".