Joscha Bach on why mind uploading won't work, why Penrose and Hameroff are wrong, whether AGI is possible on current hardware, and what the apocalypse, the Singularity and God have in common

Joscha Bach is one of the few cognitive scientists willing to explain consciousness in mechanistic terms without retreating to Chopra levels of woo-woo mysticism. His position: mind uploading via connectome mapping rests on a category error; the connectome captures the routing topology of a nervous system, not the computational substrate where cognition actually happens. C. elegans is exhibit A: 302 neurons mapped since 1986, still no working simulation forty years later. The implication for human brain emulation is unflattering.