Can You Really Clone Someone's Consciousness?

In the new sci-fi movie Replicas, opening today, Keanu Reeves plays Dr. Will Foster, a neuroscientist whose family is killed in a terrible car accident. Determined to bring them back, Dr. Foster storms into his laboratory, pulls down a futuristic visor, and uploads the minds of his loved ones to new bio-compatible substrates.

With that task completed, he hacks a few robots, applies bio-identical skin grafts and—voila!—a new family. Or are they? (Cue scary music.)

"There was a crash. You and the kids died. I brought you back," Reeves says to a reanimated Mona, his wife, (or rather her clone), who suddenly realizes she's not as she was. Is she still real?

PCMag emailed with Replicas director Jeffrey Nachmanoff to see how he and Keanu approached the making of the movie.

Jeffrey, when you first got the script, how much did you already know about neuroscience, brain emulation, transfer of neural nets?
I had read Steven Pinker and Ray Kurzweil, but I was an English major so my understanding of true neuroscience is pretty rudimentary. But I find the subject endlessly fascinating. The questions neuroscience brings up are really fundamental. Will we ever be able to unlock the key to consciousness and understand how the human mind functions? And if so, what are the implications for us as a species? Should we even try? What does it mean when the computer understands how it works? Are we more than the sum of our parts?

So you were keen to direct a movie that addressed all these concepts.
Right. When I read the script to Replicas it struck a chord because it plays with some of these ideas. William (Keanu) faces a classic dilemma—his technological advances have outrun his ethical training (a problem that is rapidly overtaking the field of genomics as per the recent news out of China). In the abstract, we can all agree that bringing people back from the dead is problematic. But what if it's your own family? What would any of us do? I thought the script offered a clever and fun way to play with some interesting science-fiction ideas within the framework of a family-oriented thriller.

It feels like a great fit for Keanu, and I enjoyed him in the role. He brought a gravitas and geek-level of intricate focus.
I thought it was a great fit for Keanu since he starred in The Matrix, which set the bar for an entire generation of movies that mixed big ideas and pure entertainment. Our goal was to make a movie that plays with some of the problems posed by neuroscience but not to take it too seriously.

Where did you get the visual inspiration for the lab sequences? I wrote about a genomics HQ in Huntsville, Alabama, near NASA Johnson that reminded me a lot of your movie. Did you go there?
No, but I'm jealous! I want to go there! The visuals for the lab sequence were inspired by computer-generated visualizations we downloaded from various research labs that model brain activity and the human connectome. We wanted to create the feel of something real but just a step forward into future tech. One thing we noticed is that in real labs a lot of things are kind of kludged together. They are rarely as sterile and perfect and high-tech as what you might see in Tony Stark's lab. Besides, we couldn't compete with Marvel's budget anyway so we had to give our lab a very different look and feel.

The interface where William [Reeves] can 'see' and 'manipulate' brain patterns and memory networks was deeply cool. Talk about that.
The 3D augmented reality interface that Keanu uses was the product of the combined efforts of several different VFX artists and a lot of trial and error. I wanted it to feel like he was conducting a symphony (which is why the score is fully orchestral in that scene). The idea was to somehow convey the unfathomable complexity of the neural network that he is manipulating and how, as with music, you'd almost have to intuit control of such a complex and interconnected system. We tried to follow some basic principles in terms of brain function and logic (color coding relevant regions, lobes, etc. as the neural net is "transferred") but obviously we took a lot of liberties.

How did you embark on research. Who did you interview, meet, and have as technical advisers on the film?
Mostly I scoured the internet for articles on what type of cutting-edge research is going in terms of neural mapping. I read about Jack Gallant's "Brain Atlas" project using fMRI mapping at UC Berkeley and the Human Connectome Project at USC. We were shooting down in Puerto Rico and we had a consultant there, Sebastian Boneta, who has a company that builds memory palaces and he helped give us some pointers on language. And of course our production designer and post VFX team did a lot of research on robotics.

Finally, what did Keanu bring to the part in terms of the nerd aspect? Did he already have ideas on character, sci-tech knowledge and people to bring in to advise?
Yes, Keanu had already done a ton of reading on neuroscience before I came on. He was really prepared. You'd be surprised at what a nerd he is about details. His preparation for parts is pretty legendary—everybody has seen how much physical training he does for John Wick. He was the same way about this role. He didn't just want to say the lines—he wanted to know what everything meant. In fact, he ad-libbed entire sections of jargon in the film when he's working in the lab doing the neural mapping. That was all Keanu.

What About Reality?

In the future portrayed in Replicas human cloning is still outlawed, but PCMag wanted to find out what scientists are doing today about brain injury and consciousness. We spoke with UCLA's Dr. Martin M. Monti, whose MontiLab research facility is jointly housed by the psychology and neurosurgery divisions.

A focus of Professor Monti's research is how consciousness is lost and recovered after severe brain injury. To this end, his team famously "jump-started" the brain of a patient who had been in a coma for 19 days. Here are edited and condensed excerpts of our conversation.

Firstly, Dr. Monti, I am loath to ask a bona fide academic this, but in the movie Replicas, Keanu Reeves brings his family back from the dead. Thoughts?
[Laughs] Well. One question is whether those "replicas" would be "conscious" or not. The answer may well be yes, depending on which theory of consciousness you subscribe to. Alternatively, she is now a philosophical zombie: she looks like you and me, she walks and talks like you and me, but she has no conscious experience (and no, this type of zombie does not eat human flesh).

Which we'll get to in a moment.
Okay, good. I guess, assuming she's not a philosophical zombie, on the subject of Replicas, for now, the more intriguing question is: "Is it the same consciousness as before?" Is it the same "I" that emerges from [the replica's] neural activity? It's tough to know if we'll ever get to answer that.

In Replicas, he downloads the entire brain into a silicon-based robot clone. Does this, in your opinion, have any scientific basis at all?
It depends on which theory of consciousness you believe. There's the integrated information theory, which posits that consciousness is about the spatio-temporel grain of "the system." As in, if you recreate the exact function of neurons and swap every neuron with a chip, connect it all in exactly the same way, and imagine that these brain connections are simply circuits, then, if you re-engineer the system in a non-biological format and flip the switch…

….then the new silicon-based neural network—aka brain—will just work?
I would say I don't think it's impossible. Someday we'll know.

So how do you define consciousness? It's not just a cluster of neurons we can see on a scan at all is it?
To me the key point is that consciousness might be more of a "how" than a "where." We know more about how the brain is set up, connected in certain ways—it's possible consciousness is a mode of operation, of communications. For example, in terms of brain function, the difference between being conscious and unconscious is a bit like the difference between driving from Los Angeles to New York in a straight line versus having to cover the same route hopping on and off several buses that force you to take a zig-zag route and stop in several places.

You're famous for "jump starting" the brain of a coma patient by deploying low intensity focused ultrasound pulsation (LIFUP).
That was the headline on an article about my work [Laughs]. It's not really how it worked. But let me explain: there is a certain structures at the heart of the brain—the thalamus—which is how the front of the brain talks to the back, with many, many connections going back and forth. Now we know that the more atrophied the thalamus, the fewer connections, the deeper the impairment. But by getting to the thalamus, in a non-invasive way—by using ultrasound, instead of the usual risky surgical procedure known as deep brain stimulation implanting electrodes directly—we could try something different. We applied 650 khz, in quick vibrations, onto the neural tissue, which turned into electric potential.

The ultrasound vibrations mimicked the thalamus' pre-coma behavior and essentially got it working again, delivering electrical impulses from one side of the brain to the other, creating neural connections and rousing the comatose patient. Amazing. What was the device used?
We used technology from BrainSonix, which was developed by Dr. Alexander Bystritsky, one of my esteemed colleagues here at UCLA.

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Who funds your research and to what end?
This particular research is funded by wonderful organizations including UCLA, the James S. McDonnell Foundation, and the Dana Foundation for our clinical studies, and the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation, who are funding work in consciousness research.

Let's back up: when did you first become interested in this field?
A long time ago: growing up in Italy, as a child, I spent way more time than I should have done, wondering whether the door looked in the same place to everybody as it did to me, or whether we all went through it in the same way.

That's deep for a young person.
Right [Laughs].

But you studied economics as an undergrad.
I did, but more on the studying behavioral economics and game theory—i.e. looking to understand why people do things. Then I focused on this field, doing my PhD, at Princeton, in Neurosciences and Psychology, focusing on the disorders of consciousness, as in "What makes one brain consciousness and another one not?"

When did you take up your current position at University of California, Los Angeles?
In January 2011. After my doctoral research from Princeton, I moved to the Medical Research Council in Cambridge UK, and then back to the US again for this job in 2011.

You were awarded an International Giuseppe Sciacca Award for Medical Research in Italy recently at the Pontifical University in the Vatican. How on earth did you get on the Vatican's radar?
The Vatican has a big study group around the domain of consciousness and is very interested in the latest thinking on the subject. Whenever I did talks in Italy, there were always some priests in long cassocks in attendance.

Not the usual garb for neuroscience conference attendees.
To be honest, I will admit that when I first received the email saying I'd won, I had to go and see who'd won it before, but it's a prestigious prize.

The Pontifical Academy of Sciences sponsors major conferences with global speakers. I'm considering applying for a press pass to the one on Personalized Medicine in April 2019.
They have a vast library with manuscripts going back 2000 years, it's quite a collection.

Moving from the Vatican to Israel, you were flown in to attend the hospital bed of the late former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon when he was in a coma. How did that come about?
The Ben-Gurion University of the Negev flew me in, after Ariel Sharon's family contacted them, because, when I was at Cambridge University, I'd developed a test to see how conscious someone is, on a scale of minimal to partial to full, and gradients therein. My test involved scanning the patient's brain while asking them to think of doing a certain activity—for example, playing tennis. Even though they couldn't respond physically, when they heard the instruction, that part of their brain would light up. So we knew "they're in there." Until I arrived, it was thought Ariel Sharon was in a totally vegetative state. We brought in an fMRI and did the test, and we did see activitations, but they were fleeting. He died about a year later without recovering full consciousness from an eight-year coma.

To learn more about Dr. Monti's research, he will be speaking at the North American Neuromodulation Society's annual meeting in Las Vegas next week.