Brain Uploading: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

Artificial intelligence is hard. Why reinvent the wheel, when you've got plenty of humans walking around? Who will miss one, right?

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{{examples|...Although that won't stop us from adding our own}}

== Anime and Manga ==

* ''[[Galaxy Express 999]]'' has a couple of instances of a gigantic supercomputer being used to simulate the brain of a deceased human. Whether the series' main antagonists, the "Machine-Humans", also qualify or are simply disembodied human brains inhabiting robotic shells is not made clear.

* The [[Ultimate Universe]] [[Continuity Reboot]] of [[Paperinik New Adventures]] had this trope when {{spoiler|Lyonard [[Punny Name|D'Aq]] uploaded his brain as a side result of him exploring a virtual world}}. Then this trope became a [[Chekhov's Gun]] when {{spoiler|after Lyonard got [[Killed Off for Real]] (or, more precisely, got [[One-Winged Angel|devolved into the monstrous Lyozard]] ''and then'' got killed off) [[Back from the Dead|and Uno downloaded the data version of his brain into a (superpowered, of course) bionic body]].}}

* This happened to Cliff Steele (Robotman) in [[Grant Morrison]]'s [[Doom Patrol]] after the Candlemaker crushed his brain. Fortunately, he was hooked up to the Chief's computer at the time, and his intelligence was downloaded on a disk. Once he figured out what happened, he was able to return to his body, though he was pretty freaked out by the entire process.

* [[Savage Dragon]] featured a number of characters with [[Power Armor]] who had previously downloaded their brainwaves into the suit, allowing them to continue fighting long after death.

 

** In the new-series two-parter "Silence in the Library"/"Forest of the Dead", the computer at the heart of the titular library is an uploaded version of a young girl who had a terminal illness. She's also capable of storing and running the personalities of anyone else who tries to teleport while in the library, as well as anyone who dies in the library while wearing neural relay.

** In the original series, the Time Lord Matrix was a supercomputer that contained the recorded ''memories'' of all the past presidents of Gallifrey, but apparently not their complete personalities.

* Turns up in, of all places, ''[[Red Dwarf]]'' as the technology behind hologrammatic characters—every crew member has their personality and memories uploaded and stored so they are available come back as a [[Virtual Ghost]] after they die. Whether it is possible to activate a hologram while the crew member is still alive has never been raised. We do know it's possible to activate a single hologram multiple times - as shown with Rimmer times two.

* ''[[Overdrawn at the Memory Bank]]'' called it a "dopple" (as in doppelganger). Once your brain was uploaded to a [[When Things Spin, Science Happens|spinning cube]] you could take a vacation and experience life as an animal. Aaron Fingle's dopple was botched when the technicians lost his body and were forced to upload his consciousness to a mainframe as an interim solution. The film indicated he had a limited amount of time before his consciousness degraded to the point of non-functionality. It wasn't really made clear if this was a function of the transfer, the inability of his body to continue function without the mind or some other factor, but then again it was a made for TV movie aired on PBS. It was also lampooned on [[Mystery Science Theater 3000]].