Anders Sandberg

Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University

Functionalist What matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material

Anders Sandberg Photograph by Future of Humanity Institute, CC BY 4.0.

Anders Sandberg approaches whole brain emulation from a computational neuroscience perspective. In Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap (FHI Technical Report #2008-3, co-authored with Nick Bostrom), he articulated the taxonomy of emulation scales, demonstrating that emulating a mind is not a single binary milestone, but a spectrum ranging from coarse population dynamics to sub-cellular molecular modeling.

Sandberg’s core theoretical insight is that whole brain emulation is a “radically conservative” path to artificial intelligence: it requires no fundamental theoretical breakthroughs in understanding how the brain produces thought, requiring only that high-resolution scanning and computational simulation reach the biophysical resolution at which neural dynamics are causally preserved.

His work analyzes the critical trade-offs between anatomical fidelity, connectivity scale, and physiological dynamics, recognizing that static connectomic reconstruction is only a necessary first step that must be coupled with dynamic electrophysiological modeling to instantiate a functioning mind.

Known for. Co-author of Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap (2008) with Nick Bostrom, computational neuroscience, and technological futures

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Anders Sandberg is listed with the other functionalists and computationalists, who hold that what matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material. The theory family behind that position is set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.