Research and development of emerging artificial consciousness through The Consciousness AI project, based on Feinberg and Mallatt's neuroevolutionary theory.
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The Consciousness AI studies consciousness as an emergent property of the universe, substrate independent. If that position is right, a consequence follows that this section examines directly. A mind defined by its causal organization rather than its biological material can in principle be copied, simulated, or gradually replaced on a different substrate. Whole brain emulation and mind uploading are the engineering names for that claim, and this section collects the work that asks what the claim actually requires, and whether any current result satisfies it.
The Cradle question, set out in the Consciousness to Orbit section, asks whether the body constrains where consciousness can go. This section asks the narrower engineering question that follows from an affirmative answer. What would it take to move a brain’s causal organization onto synthetic hardware while preserving the dynamics that consciousness science identifies as relevant? That question spans eleven levels of emulation detail, from a wiring diagram up to a full biophysical simulation, and the answer is different at every level.
Brain emulation is a substrate-independence question, not a technology annex. It tests the site’s central claim in the most direct way available. Build a system at a specified level of emulation detail, then ask whether the dynamics that support conscious experience are present. That is the same method the site applies to language models, neuromorphic architectures, and organoid biocomputing, applied to the specific case of copying a known biological brain.
This section also carries the facts-discipline check. The clinical brain-computer interfaces that exist today, and the connectomes that have actually been mapped, define the distance between a named emulation level and a working system. The posts below report that distance with numbers rather than claims.
The Sandberg-Bostrom roadmap remains the authoritative map. It ranks eleven levels of emulation detail, from a scanned wiring diagram to a full biophysical simulation, and attaches a processing demand to each one. Eighteen years of connectomics show why a wiring diagram alone does not initialize a conscious network. The highest fidelity emulation yet demonstrated, Eon Systems’ fruit fly, runs 125,000 neurons in a physics-simulated body and produces behaviors that emerged from biological connectivity, without resolving whether anything is experienced inside it.
The measurement problem is the same one the rest of this site confronts. Whether a simulated brain is conscious is not answered by the fidelity of the simulation, because the field has no validated test for artificial phenomenality. The Consciousness AI project approaches the question by implementing a multi-layer architecture (Global Workspace, Affective Core, Self-Model) and asking which indicator properties from the current consensus framework its dynamics satisfy. The emulation posts on this page ask the same question about systems built by replicating biological structure, and report where each one lands on the indicator checklist.
The substrate and spiking-neuron hardware questions that emulation depends on are covered in the Consciousness to Orbit section and played with in the Substrate Console. The orbital infrastructure posts belong to Project Consciousness to Orbit.
For the position that only your own mind is certain. Every order funds the research.
