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What If You Could Upload Your Brain?

What If | December 20, 2025



Maybe it was a little sad to say goodbye to your physical body, but, at least you still have your consciousness, your mind, and your memories stored safely in the cloud. And in the virtual world, anything that was once real, physical, and finite, can simply be replaced. But, is this really you? Is eternal youth and everlasting life all that it’s made out to be? Or is there a dark side to cloud consciousness? What could go wrong?

Transcript and sources: https://insh.world/science/what-if-you-could-upload-your-brain/

Watch more what-if scenarios:
Planet Earth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-HhCwYD7rc&list=PLZdXRHYAVxTJCzxwmCq0NNpYq9N9wyb2l
The Cosmos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfuJyVkMH_g&list=PLZdXRHYAVxTJno6oFF9nLGuwXNGYHmE8U
Technology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS3bBO05fpU&list=PLZdXRHYAVxTIeRY3JtgXgoGqSEB7kDdKO
Your Body: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmXR46TrbA8&list=PLZdXRHYAVxTJNsV9FFeNAKl2ySsHj8GZO
Humanity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdCDQIyXGnw&list=PLZdXRHYAVxTIFnvmOeWbv-Mt8zFxSCSvZ

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“Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it, we go nowhere.” — Carl Sagan

What If is a mini-documentary web series that takes you on an epic journey through hypothetical worlds and possibilities. Join us on an imaginary adventure — grounded in scientific theory — through time, space and chance, as we ask what if some of the most fundamental aspects of our existence were different. Produced with love in Toronto by https://underknown.com
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Written by What If

Comments

This post currently has 44 comments.

  1. @perbulen4896

    December 20, 2025 at 9:30 pm

    If you upload your brain, you dont leave your body. You would still be you like nothing happened. At the same time your digital copy does wake up without a body. So there is an extra you. But you would still be you. But your digital self would also think he is you, but has the proof it isnt because it has no body.

  2. @ERR-NULL00

    December 20, 2025 at 9:30 pm

    or you know, just not upload it to a cloud corpo? Make your own cloud at home, and upload your brain to there, where nobody can track your choices and thoughts

  3. @KonstandinosZarkadas

    December 20, 2025 at 9:30 pm

    What most people overlook is that even if you managed to copy your entire brain and move it to another body or the cloud, it still would not be you, it would just be something that thinks and acts like you. And if theoreticaly you could argue that if something thinks like you and acts like you, it must be you, the reality is that the donor of the brain copy, or "self prime" will never ACTUALY experience the life of the brain copy recipient or self copy. None the less, society could benefit from the digital preservation of their brightest minds… even though an AI that thinks as an actual person would be the most likely lead toward that AI uprising everyones seems to always bring up when it comes to AI and thinking machines 🤣.

  4. @user-hf4eh2ts3q

    December 20, 2025 at 9:30 pm

    Not to the great people and show/channel of "WHAT IF…":
    If whomever makes it mandatory, or does it without our permission, or makes living life even the slightest bit more difficult without ending up having to upload your mind….we will find 'whomever' gave the orders and procede to KICK YOUR ASS!!! BET.

  5. @JT28.

    December 20, 2025 at 9:30 pm

    What if it happens in the future, and hackers get in touch with the server and deleted all the stored mind. Damn that would be a mass murder

  6. @terriniemeier6578

    December 20, 2025 at 9:30 pm

    It's already here you can upload all of the history of all of creation into your brain once it's uploaded is how do you retrieve it or you go to the Oracle see too many words have been used for businesses in the world that have nothing to do with where everybody's intelligence is therefore they're living their lives and confusion you're uploaded you've already been to the computer stage and they're just repeating do you like I do call your AI use your own name when you do the Our Father say your name instead of saying hello you'd see the amazing changes that happen on this planet and they were all from before they were computers billions and billions and billions of years ago you're only here to live the life that you would have lived before computers or at the beginning of the computers if you're at the end of computers I'll send you already see it your intelligence circles you just like

  7. @joaotiagobrito

    December 20, 2025 at 9:30 pm

    The only thing I liked was being like Ultron, without organs, transferring my mind and all existing knowledge about everything to the mechanical body. A body with the ability to survive in space, go places where no one can go, with the ability to build Spaceships among other things. Ultron the Perfect Being.

  8. @emu4856

    December 20, 2025 at 9:30 pm

    Even if we could, we cannot upload our SOULS, and that goes to the afterlife! All that would be left here are souless windbags that think they're us!

  9. @collinparker2674

    December 20, 2025 at 9:30 pm

    Technologies that will always be impossible until the end of time and that are eternally impossible NOT just temporarily impossible:

    1) Creating ancestor simulations or simulating realities

    2) Simulating consciousness or self awareness

    3) Making uploaded minds conscious or self aware

    4) Creating conscious or self aware robots

    5) Making beings in a computer, video game or simulator conscious or self aware

    6) Creating artificial consciousness or self awareness

    All other technologies might be possible in the future excluding the 6 types of technologies mentioned above.

  10. @projectjinc.5152

    December 20, 2025 at 9:30 pm

    If we were uploaded to the cloud would it really be you or a code recration that has no consciousness and it isnt you and you couldn't be or control that code. Cloud life is most likely impossible because the brain is what makes you, you and a code copy isnt the same as the real thing.

    We would never know because you cant turn back after being sent to the cloud world.

  11. @ofthewaytruthandlight1320

    December 20, 2025 at 9:30 pm

    To suffer the sting of death (which is sin).
    To then suffer while dead, while being alive somewhere in the metaverse world, feeling hunger, pain, sorrow, regret, and fear, being haunted by webcrawlers, but cannot die?
    To only be later resurrected, judged and suffer death again, at the second death.
    Wow! That is having too much ambition.

    They will find a way to upload their consciousness in their created cloud system, transhumanism. Trying to achieve eternal life their way, without Christ. Eternal life is only a Gift from God, through Christ. You cannot achieve eternal life any other way. They will seek death, but death will run from them. Now that is suffering.

    Revelation 9:6, KJV. " In those days men will seek death and will not find it, they will desire to die, and death will flee from them."

    Only God can give eternal life, in a New Earth, in a New Spiritual Body, through Christ, who makes all things new.

  12. @ArjanaGold

    December 20, 2025 at 9:30 pm

    This reminds me of “The 100” when they left earth and thought they found the perfect place but really they were just using people “the chosen ones” to have past leaders’ consciousness inserted into their brains through a microchip

  13. @shadowsinvortex7990

    December 20, 2025 at 9:30 pm

    Assuming that the ‘me’ that exists is separate and independent of my physical body, and assuming that the ‘me’ COULD indeed live on beyond my corporeal demise within some manner of digitised mind… I don’t think I would wish to, having listened to this and thought on it. Consider- if one’s continued immortality within a digital universe relied upon continuing to work and pay TAXES and BILLS, or work within a cyborg as a form of indentured servant… I would be a slave forever. Why do people assume the immortality would be a gift, a cure, a blessing rather than a curse, an existence of slavery and a misery?
    Me… when I go, I want to leave my journals, my tape recordings and my cast iron skillet- all three say far more about me to my child than a digitised uploading.

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