Books, TV, and movies have for years told fantastic stories in which the consciousness of humans or other living beings can be transferred to a computer and later to a machine capable of materializing a physical body for this new digital mind. We have seen this most recently in the 2014 Transcendence: The Revolution, but the same concept has already been shown in the Caprica (2010) series and in several other stories. Now it seems that science has found a way to once again turn fiction into reality.

The new creature has even been trained to successfully swing an object on its tail.

Researchers at the Vienna Technological University in Austria were able to copy the brain of a Caenorhabditis elegans worm to a computer and then give the animal a robotic body. The new creature was even trained to swing an object on its tail successfully.

The robot has been trained to swing the object by a process very similar to dog training, which consists in rewarding the animal when he performs a certain action to encourage him to repeat it when requested. In this case, the worm already had the natural urge to squirm when its body was touched, so learning to swing the object properly was apparently an extension of that.

Scheme shows how the robot behaves the same way as the worm

It is also worth mentioning that the "original copy" of the worm's brain is the only "line of code" inserted in the computer program that controls the robot. There was no programming on the part of humans. The original worm in your organic body measures only one millimeter and has only 300 neurons in your nervous system. Being an extremely simple creature, it was possible to do the experiment successfully.

According to the researchers, the behavior of the robot worm is very similar to that of the original creature.

According to the researchers, the behavior of the robot worm is very similar to that of the original creature. This is determined by the neural functions that the creature developed biologically, which were copied to a computer through a completely unspecified procedure.

Although the worm is a simple creature and probably not self-conscious, nothing indicates that with more information and better techniques it is not possible to copy the brain of some more complex animal to a computer. The moment it is possible to transfer a mammal's consciousness, for example, we will be close to taking the human mind digitally and technically allowing people to live forever. However, we have no prediction of when or how exactly this could happen.

Scientists copy biological brain to a robot and train new living being via TecMundo