---
title: "Whole-brain emulation · Hypothetical minds · Entities · Simulation Hypothesis"
url: https://simulation-hypothesis.com/entities/h-wbe
description: "Scanning a brain in fine detail and running a software model of it."
license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
credit: "Ross Allan Dahl, Simulation Hypothesis (simulation-hypothesis.com)"
---

[Entities](https://simulation-hypothesis.com/entities) › Hypothetical minds

# Whole-brain emulation

unobserved Proposed in the literature. Nobody has observed one.

Scanning a brain in fine detail and running a software model of it.

Scanning a brain in fine detail and running a software model of it. The roadmap lists eleven emulation levels, with increasing biological detail, from high-level computational modules up to molecular and quantum scale. Its estimates of the processing a human brain needs are about 10^18 FLOPS for a spiking-network model, 10^22 for electrophysiology and 10^25 for the metabolome. Unobserved: nobody has built a human-scale emulation.

In the trees

[Whole-brain emulation · Technology](https://simulation-hypothesis.com/trees/technology?n=wbe)[Whole-brain emulation · Simulations](https://simulation-hypothesis.com/trees/simulations?n=f-wbe)[Whole-brain emulation · Becoming synthetic](https://simulation-hypothesis.com/trees/synthetic?n=s-wbe)

## Sources

* Sandberg A, Bostrom N (2008) Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap. Technical Report #2008-3, Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University.