Nonprofit Synconetics seeks funding for gradual brain replacement and offers investors rights to equity in future companies

Nonprofit Synconetics seeks funding for gradual brain replacement and offers investors rights to equity in future companies

On November 2, Daniel Burger, president and chief scientist of Synconetics, confirmed on X that the organization is seeking philanthropic funding. It aims to replace the living brain piece by piece with lab-grown neural tissue integrated with electronics, while maintaining uninterrupted consciousness.

The blogger Crémieux posted a photo of a slide and asked, “Can the brain be gradually replaced?” An hour later, he added that a company was working on this and raising money. Burger replied that the organization was Synconetics. When a reader asked whether they were raising funds, he wrote:

“Our gradual brain replacement program is run by Synconetics, a nonprofit organization committed to open science. We are currently actively raising philanthropic funding.”

Synconetics starts from the premise that consciousness is a continuous chain of physical processes in the brain, which death irreversibly breaks. In its view, longevity research slows the deterioration of the body, but a single brain injury or disease can break that chain, while uploading the mind to a computer would, at best, produce a copy. The organization is therefore looking for a way to replace the brain gradually while keeping the chain intact. Its five-year goal is the first verifiable transfer of living brain function to an artificial substrate without interrupting consciousness.

In a 2025 essay, Burger and his coauthors propose a condition for keeping the chain intact: an intervention must change the brain slowly enough for it to adapt. They draw support from patients with slow-growing tumors. According to a 2007 review, these patients tolerated the removal of large amounts of tissue without noticeable functional impairment, whereas recovery after a sudden injury such as a stroke was substantially poorer.

Burger uses the growth rate of these tumors to estimate how long replacement would take. In November 2025, he estimated that if the replaced region expanded by 2 millimeters per year, like a slow-growing tumor, replacing the entire adult cerebral cortex could take 35 years of continuous surgery. At one millimeter per year, it would take more than 70 years. On September 28 this year, he wrote that isolating the brain from the body could greatly accelerate replacement by giving surgeons access to it from all sides, around the clock. His for-profit company Eightsix Science is working on brain isolation (“Step №0”), while Synconetics is working on gradual replacement.

The slide in Crémieux’s post outlines a forthcoming paper that Burger promised to publish under the Eightsix name by the end of the year. Brain regions would first be replaced one at a time. The brain would then be removed and connected to a support system outside the body, with the person living in a virtual environment. In response to that promise, entrepreneur Andrey Panferov listed unresolved problems: “Step №0 encompasses several unresolved fields hidden inside a box labeled ‘brain isolation.’” His list states that current cardiopulmonary bypass systems force a trade-off between blood clots and bleeding, and that each operation adds a risk of stroke and infection.

According to the website, donations fund basic protocols for a transition that preserves consciousness, along with fundamental research that commercial investors avoid because of its long timelines. The site says contributions of 5000 dollars or more substantially advance the work. The organization offers investors a SARE agreement, described in a May document. A contribution entitles the investor to equity in a commercial company if one is spun out of its research. If no company exists by the agreed date, the contribution becomes a donation. The agreement is available only to investors legally eligible to enter into such transactions.