Uploading and Functional Emulation: A Talk with Netholabs' CEO, Catalin Mitelut

​Join us for a talk with Netholabs CEO Catalin Mitelut on functional emulation: a path to whole-brain emulation that aims to model brain function without requiring a complete physical scan of a brain.

​Note: We're currently hiring ML engineers in the SFBA. If you know any interested in WBE, please invite them!

​Code to enter Mox will be provided at the beginning of the event here: https://moxsf.com/door?evt=Sg1LyWqcexju

​Abstract for the talk:

​Consciousness science has a theory problem. After 2,400+ years of philosophy and a proliferating field of ~200 distinct theories of consciousness the discipline appears stuck: theories are being added faster than they are being ruled out. The experimental paradigms that dominate the field cluster around brief, lab-bound phenomena rather than the agency-relevant timescales where consciousness arguably lives. Recent canonical attempts to assess machine consciousness (e.g., Butlin et al. 2023) inherit this problem: indicator properties derived from human and animal evidence are applied to substrates built for unrelated objectives, with no ground truth and no shared interpretability.

This talk argues that the way forward is experimental, not theoretical, and introduces Functional Emulation (FE): AI models trained directly on the neural recordings and naturalistic behaviour of a living mammal. Functional emulations offer a substrate where the same objections collapse: dynamics are brain-like by construction, units have known biological correspondents, and the source organism itself serves as ground truth. FE can be causally perturbed, opening a path to causal experiments on agency, self-representation, and the scaling laws of conscious-like dynamics. We also share progress from Netholabs, an FE startup: neuroethology platforms, custom neural implants and early emulation results from IBL mouse data.  We close with an invitation to the community to bring their theories of consciousness to a substrate where neural states and behaviour can be jointly controlled and perturbed.