Andrew McKenzie’s essay: brain emulation needs a marketable product before it can create a digital person
Andrew McKenzie’s essay: brain emulation needs a marketable product before it can create a digital person
On October 15, brain preservation researcher Andrew McKenzie published an essay on how debates about personal identity can influence investment. He compares two paths: rejuvenation could yield marketable treatments as incremental medical benefits become available, while brain emulation needs a useful product before it can create a fully realized digital person.
Brain emulation is a proposed digital system that reproduces the workings of a particular brain. McKenzie begins with a science fiction teleporter: a device scans a person, interrupts their consciousness, and creates an identical version elsewhere. At this point, the technical problem becomes personal: would the person’s own experience continue after such a transfer?
In the 2020 PhilPapers survey of philosophers, 35% of respondents accepted or leaned toward the view that the person would survive the teleporter scenario, while 40% accepted or leaned toward the view that the person would die. Asked about replacing the brain with a digital emulation, 27% said the person would survive, and 54% said the person would die. McKenzie sees these figures as evidence of persistent disagreement over whether a digital copy would continue a person’s own experience or be a new person with the same life history.
Founders Fund, the venture capital firm where Peter Thiel is a partner, led a $58 million funding round for Until Labs. The company is developing reversible cryopreservation of donor organs: a way to freeze them and then restore their function. McKenzie cites this funding round and Thiel’s public position on mind uploading to illustrate how beliefs about personal continuity relate to which technologies an investor is willing to wait for.
McKenzie’s economic argument starts with when a marketable product becomes available. In his model, a therapy that adds even one or two years to average life expectancy could already be sold. Brain emulation needs a product that provides value to users in its own right before a fully realized digital person becomes possible.
He identifies personal AI systems as a possible early market: digital systems that reproduce a particular person’s behavior with increasing accuracy. These systems could be useful in their own right, while the essay’s central question concerns continuity of first-person experience: whether that person’s own experience would continue. McKenzie argues that this distinction determines what an advocate of emulation would regard as survival, how long they would be willing to wait, and how much money they would be willing to commit.