The Department has chartered the Neural Continuity Research Program (NCRP), a staged, long-term research effort led by the Directorate of Neural Continuity to investigate whether human cognition could eventually be represented on computational systems.
WASHINGTON — The Department of Strategic Continuity today chartered the Neural Continuity Research Program (NCRP), a long-term research program led by the Directorate of Neural Continuity with participation from the Office of Advanced Artificial Intelligence, the Continuity Infrastructure Administration (CIA-DSC) and the Office of Long-Term Systems Research.
The program will investigate whether human cognition could eventually be represented, reconstructed and sustained on computational systems. Its long-term goal, which the program charter describes as explicitly aspirational, is the preservation of human minds in purpose-built computational infrastructure. No such capability exists today, and the charter states that the program’s early work is to determine what would be required, what is not yet known, and whether the objective is achievable at all.
“This is a research program, and it begins with the questions we cannot yet answer,” said the Director, Directorate of Neural Continuity. “The current state of the science allows neuron-level models of very small nervous systems and parts of larger ones. The distance from there to a human brain is very large, and the program is designed to measure that distance honestly, one stage at a time.”
Phase I: Foundations
The program is organized in four phases, each contingent on the results of the last. Phase I, which begins today and runs through 2028, will establish the foundations on which any later work would depend:
- standards for the acquisition of brain tissue imaging data at synaptic resolution;
- emulation benchmarks using small organisms, against which models can be compared with observed behavior and physiology;
- an ethics framework for research involving human neural data; and
- a Neural Data Preservation Framework setting out how such data are to be described, verified and stored over long periods.
Progress will be described using the Department’s Emulation Fidelity Levels, a scale from EFL-0 (statistical or behavioral models) to EFL-6 (a validated individual-equivalent emulation, which remains hypothetical). The state of the art corresponds to EFL-3 for the nematode C. elegans and for partial circuits of the fruit fly Drosophila. Later phases would address mammalian-scale reconstruction and, subject to results and review, human-scale feasibility.
Ethics review
All NCRP research protocols will be reviewed by the Department’s standing Research Ethics Review Board before they proceed. The program’s advancement from one phase to the next will be subject to review by the Research Ethics Review Board and the External Scientific Advisory Board. Questions of personal identity and continuity, which the charter treats as unresolved scientific and philosophical questions, will be addressed in a working paper now in preparation.
The program’s emulation benchmark suite will be hosted at Continuity Research Facility Alpha in southern Nevada once the facility reaches initial operating capability.
Further information is available on the Directorate of Neural Continuity page. Media inquiries may be submitted through the Contact page.