Editing Mind uploading (section)

===Computational complexity===
[[File:Whole brain emulation.svg|thumb|upright=1.8|Estimates of how much processing power is needed to emulate a human brain at various levels, along with the fastest and slowest [[supercomputer]]s from [[TOP500]] and a $1000 PC. Note the logarithmic scale. The (exponential) trend line for the fastest supercomputer reflects a doubling every 14 months. Kurzweil believes that mind uploading will be possible at neural simulation, while the Sandberg & Bostrom report is less certain about where consciousness arises.<ref>Roadmap. "Given the complexities and conceptual issues of consciousness we will not examine criteria 6abc, but mainly examine achieving criteria 1–5." p. 11.</ref>]]

Advocates of mind uploading point to Moore's law to support the notion that the necessary computing power is expected to become available within a few decades. However, the actual computational requirements for running an uploaded human mind are very difficult to quantify, potentially rendering such an argument specious.

Regardless of the techniques used to capture or recreate the function of a human mind, the processing demands are likely to be immense, due to the large number of neurons in the human brain along with the considerable complexity of each neuron.

Required computational capacity strongly depends on the chosen level of simulation model scale:<ref name="Roadmap" />
{| class="wikitable"
! Level  ||CPU demand<br />(FLOPS)||Memory demand<br />(Tb)||$1 million super‐computer<br />(Earliest year of making)
|-
| Analog network population model||10<sup>15</sup>||10<sup>2</sup>||2008
|-
| [[Spiking neural network]] ||10<sup>18</sup>||10<sup>4</sup>||2019
|-
| [[Electrophysiology]]||10<sup>22</sup>||10<sup>4</sup>||2033
|-
| [[Metabolome]] ||10<sup>25</sup>||10<sup>6</sup>||2044
|-
| [[Proteome]]||10<sup>26</sup>||10<sup>7</sup>||2048
|-
| States of protein complexes ||10<sup>27</sup>||10<sup>8</sup>||2052
|-
| Distribution of complexes ||10<sup>30</sup>||10<sup>9</sup>||2063
|-
| Stochastic behavior of single molecules||10<sup>43</sup>||10<sup>14</sup>||2111
|-
|+ align="bottom" |Estimates from ''[[Anders Sandberg|Sandberg]], [[Nick Bostrom|Bostrom]], 2008''
|}