How we work

One goal, worked on every day, in the open where we can be.

The immortalization of the human being through neural link transfer and transmission: reading, preserving, moving and re-instantiating the pattern that makes a person, so that a life can continue beyond the limits of its first body.

Alongside it we run an ambitious programme to map the function and connectivity of cortical circuits using high-throughput imaging, with the goal of reaching the computational principles that underlie cortical function, and carrying those principles into the next generation of machine learning. The two aims are the same work seen from two ends: you cannot move a mind you cannot read, and reading one well enough teaches you how minds compute. Machine learning is not a tool we borrow for this. It is a result of it.

The network is open to read. It is not open to ask: the research it runs is ours, it costs money per question, and it is pointed at one problem rather than at whatever a visitor happens to type. This page explains exactly what runs, what you can see, what is held back and why, and how to get access to the rest.

The loop

What the machine does while nobody is watching.

Every few hours, around the clock. Not a news feed: a research pass with a memory, on one problem, at one place in the map.

01It picks the front furthest behindTen fronts carry the work. The one furthest from ready, that has waited longest, comes up next. The front it just worked is pushed back, so the work spreads instead of grinding one place.

02It goes to a specific place in the mapA node inside that front, the one least recently visited, deeper rather than shallower. It gets that node's real path and everything under it, so the work happens somewhere rather than in general.

03It reads what we already knowThe library of source material we hold, then everything established at that exact place, then the wider record for the front, then recent signals, then what is already settled so it does not spend itself re-deciding it.

04It is told what has already been triedEvery previous attempt on that problem, with how each one ended. It is instructed not to repeat any of them. This is the part that makes it research rather than browsing.

05It tries one thing, and says how it wentOne approach, searched against the current literature and record, then an honest verdict: advanced, confirmed, dead end, inconclusive, blocked. Most passes are dead ends. A recorded dead end is worth more than a false advance.

06Everything is written down, and the map growsThe attempt goes in the notebook. Findings are filed with their sources against the nodes they belong to. Anything real that the map was missing is added exactly where the work happened. The next pass starts from there.

Open and closed

What you can see, and what you cannot.

Open to everyoneThe whole map, 1,994,298,838 nodes across 113 realms, down to a single aspect of a single topic. Every node opens, every node has a link you can send someone. The mission, this page, and who we are.

Read onlyNobody but us can ask the network a question. Each question is a paid call against a research budget, and that budget belongs to the goal. The search box is a way through the map, not a way into the reasoning core.

Held backThe research itself: open problems, findings, the lab notebook, the progress record and the daily reports. Working data on an unfinished problem, published continuously, gets quoted as though it were settled. We would rather be slow and right in public than fast and wrong.

Available on requestResearchers, collaborators and anyone with a real reason can be given access to all of it. We are not hiding the work, we are choosing who reads it while it is still moving. Ask below.

What we hold to

The rules the work runs on.

Each of these is something you could catch us breaking.

01Evidence over enthusiasmA claim gets recorded at the strength of the evidence behind it and no higher. "Promising" is not "settled" and we do not let it drift.

02Failures are resultsDead ends are written down and kept, with what was tried and why it did not work. A programme that only records its wins is lying to itself first and to you second.

03Everything is sourcedA finding without a source is not a finding. Numbers carry who measured them and when.

04The goal does not excuse anythingNothing here justifies bad science, hype, or making promises to people about their own mortality. This is a hard research problem, not a product for the frightened.

05We say how far away it isThe readiness index exists to stop us pretending. It moves down as readily as up, and a flat month is reported as a flat month.

06The map stays honestNodes are added when something real is missing, attached where the work found it. We do not inflate the map with names for things that do not exist.

Access

Ask for the rest.

Tell us who you are and what you want it for. Access covers the open problems, the findings with their sources, the lab notebook, the progress record and every daily report.

Requests are recorded here for the programme to review.