Brain Uploading: Difference between revisions

* ''[[Film/The Sixth Day|The Sixth Day]]'' features a way of making copies of a person mind that can be uploaded into clone bodies. Unfortunately as uploading is often done after death you get memories of dying.

* ''[[Star Trek: The Motion Picture]]''. After V'Ger scans and destroys Ilia, it sends a robot replica of her to the Enterprise with her memories and personality stored in it. Eventually the crew manages to re-awaken her mind in the machine.

 

== Literature ==

* ''Fool's War'' by Sarah Zettel ''appears'' to have brain uploading technology. {{spoiler|1=In actuality, it just has AIs who've figured out how to ''download'' themselves into human bodies -- the uploading process doesn't work on anyone who started their life as human.}}

* In the strange society depicted in [[Iain Banks|Iain M. Banks']] book ''Feersum Endjinn'', when a person dies their mind is automatically uploaded by organic systems in their brain (not implants; they grow there naturally implying they are germ-line genetic engineering). They then get downloaded into physical bodies again the first 7 deaths, then spend their next 8 rebirths solely in a virtual reality. Then they die for good. Nondestructive uploads can also be made, and experienced reintegrated at a later date. This allows for the possibility of people uploading copies of themselves to have a passionate affair in a suitably private virtuality, and then redownload the experiences into their minds and fully appreciate them later without interfering with work or family life.

* This is the entire plot of ''Circuit of Heaven'' by Dennis Danvers. 99% or so of humanity has uploaded their consciousness into "The Bin", a giant computer storage that lets them all live virtual lives. Those who chose to remain behind live in a [[Crapsack World]] where everything's been abandoned. They are allowed to temporarily visit their relatives within The Bin, doing a temporary brain uploading.

* ''Mindscan'' by Robert Sawyer has this technology being commercialized. Rich people get what's essentially a super MI that creates a perfect duplicate of the brain at the time and it gets uploaded in to an android body. The real people then retire to a lunar colony that's extra-legal and the droids will claim to be the humans and designed to look like them at their peak of life. The book then revolves over [[What Measure Is a Non-Human?]] as the android version has to fight over its personhood.

* The "ghosts" in the ''[[GURPS]]'' setting ''[[Transhuman Space]]''.

* "Nybor's Psychic Imprint" spell in ''[[Forgotten Realms]]'' (at least, 3rd ed).

* ''[[Car Wars]]''. Autoduelists store their memories on a machine and have clone bodies made. If they die in the arena, their memories are "played back" into their clone and they live again (well, sort of).

* Extremely common in ''[[Eclipse Phase]]''. Most of the surviving population of the solar system escaped the devastation of Earth by uploading their minds off-world, and backups are ubiquitous. Unfortunately, there's also a severe shortage of bodies, and millions of info-refugees desperate to own one.

** Also, almost every biological body (since you can inhabit artificial ones too) comes equipped with a Cortical Stack, and as in the ''Takeshi Covacs novels'', they are nearly indestructible barring a deliberate attempt to destroy them. One might wonder if ''Altered Carbon'' inspired the authors of ''[[Eclipse Phase]]'' in some way. (Then one notices the blatant [[Shout-Out]] in the opening fiction and knows it ''definitely'' did.)

 

== Videogames ==

*** In the PeTI DLC, it turns out that in an [[Alternate Universe]] Cave {{spoiler|succeeded in uploading himself. He quickly goes insane from boredom, and decides he needs to kill everyone so he can ascend to Olympus like Hercules}}. When Cave Prime hears this, he decides to cancel research into Brain Uploading, strongly suggesting "Earth 1" is not the same universe the main story takes place in.

* In the ''[[Black Market (video game)|Black Market]]'' universe, people can be downloaded into Soul Jars, while machine minds are relegated to Turing Jars. Pirates use this method to endlessly reincarnate; one of the main characters is a "Ghost" in this fashion.

* The Doctor, a [[Playful Hacker]] of ''[[City of Heroes]]'' is revealed to be one of these, and created an easily produced process to upload personalities. Oddly enough for the genre, it didn't destroy her original mind or body; [[Mega Corp|Crey]] took care of that some time after she had already gone on the net. She's treated as a [[What Measure Is a Non-Human?|human]], although she does recognize that she's not one any longer. ''[[City of Heroes]]'' also features this trope's inversion : Paragon Protectors are revealed to run on home-built personalities downloaded into clone bodies, using the same underlying technology and copied on a massive scale. [[Cloning Blues|They're fairly expendable]], in a world where normal clones or uploaded personalities are treated fairly well, but [[Mega Corp|Crey]] does tend to harvest the original copies for those personalities from the rotting corpses of dead heroes and rip out whatever higher brain functionality is left before slapping the Paragon Protector together.

* Occurs at the end of ''[[Space Quest]] 4'', when [[Big Bad]] former-"human" AI Vohaul not only uploads Roger's son's mind to a disk (1.44mb! Who knew the mind was so... compressable?), but then uploads his own mind to Roger's son. Roger then has to defeat Vohaul by putting his son's mind back in place, and transferring Vohaul's mind to the computer just seconds before a system format.