Project Continuum
What would it take to build a vessel for a human mind?
The human body is the vessel for the human mind. This new long-term project from Heaven Health begins by trying to understand consciousness and everything a body does to host it, so that a correct new vessel could one day be designed. We do not yet know what that vessel would be.
Nobody can do this today. It may take many decades, and it may turn out to be impossible. There is no product, procedure or waiting list. This page is simply where the work begins.
Where it starts
The first question is how it works
Right now, there is something it is like to be you, reading this. Science can trace much of what the brain does. It cannot yet explain why any of that activity should feel like anything at all. The philosopher David Chalmers called this the hard problem of consciousness.
The leading explanations are still being tested. In 2025 a large study built to compare two of them head to head came back challenging key parts of both. Understanding this is the first job of this project, because no one can design a vessel for something they cannot yet describe.
The chemistry of feeling
Consciousness runs on chemistry as well as wiring
A brain is more than a network of connections. Dopamine, serotonin, oestrogen and many other chemical messengers shift how the world feels from hour to hour, and much of that signalling involves the whole body. Any real account of consciousness has to treat them as data.
| Messenger | What the data shows |
|---|---|
| Dopamine | Linked to motivation, reward and movement. In the human midbrain it comes from only around 500,000 neurons, about one in every 170,000 in the brain. A tiny group can colour the whole of experience. |
| Serotonin | More than 90% of the body’s supply is estimated to be made in the gut, yet that supply does not cross into the brain, which makes its own. A 2022 review found no consistent evidence that depression is simply low serotonin. Mood is not one chemical on one dial. |
| Oestrogen | One woman had a brain scan and a blood test on 30 consecutive days. As oestradiol rose, her whole-brain networks became more tightly connected. It is a single-person study, but it shows a hormone in the blood tracking the organisation of the brain. |
Measuring this is uneven. A blood test can read oestrogen directly. Dopamine and serotonin inside a living brain are hard to measure, and usually only indirectly.
This raises one of the project’s central questions. Would a new vessel have to make these signals too? Something that kept your memories but lost your chemistry might think like you and feel nothing like you.
This is not medical advice. Many people are helped by treatments that act on these systems. Please speak to your clinician before changing any medicine.
The vessel
What a body does for a mind
The working idea of this project is that a body is a vessel for a human mind, and that a new vessel would have to do every job the old one does. As a first draft, that means six jobs.
Sustain
Deliver steady energy and oxygen, hold a stable temperature and clear waste, without a break, for a lifetime.
Sense
Bring in the outside world through sight, sound, touch, taste and smell.
Feel from within
Report the heartbeat, breath, hunger and pain that tell a mind how it is doing.
Colour experience
Supply the chemical messengers that shift mood, drive and attention.
Act
Give the mind a way to move, speak and change things, and to know that it did.
Change and repair
Let memory and skill keep developing, allow something like sleep, and mend damage.
There is a catch. A body may be more than a container. If feeling partly arises from the body’s own signals, then the vessel is part of what makes someone who they are, and a mind may not separate cleanly from it at all. That is why a new vessel would have to be correct, and not merely capable.
The idea
What would have to be true
Bodies wear out. The experience of being someone might not have to end with them. For it to continue in a new vessel, four separate problems would each need solving, and each one is enormous.
- 01
We learn what it is
We would need a real account of how a brain gives rise to experience, and which parts of that are essential.
- 02
It can be read
Memory, personality and skill seem to live in the fine structure and activity of the brain. We would need to measure what matters, in a living person, without causing harm.
- 03
A correct vessel exists
It might be an avatar body, a machine, or something nobody has imagined yet. Whatever form it takes, it would have to do all six jobs above.
- 04
You come with it
This is the hardest one, and the reason for this project's name. Getting everything else right might only produce a very good copy.
The real problem
A copy is not a continuation
Imagine a perfect scan of you wakes up in a new vessel. It has your memories and insists it is you. But you are still standing here, looking at it. There are now two people, and nothing has happened to your own experience.
So the aim cannot be a copy. One idea, explored by thinkers such as Hans Moravec and Derek Parfit, is to change the material gradually while the mind keeps running. Try it below.
Entirely biological. This is you, today. Move the slider to replace your neurons, one at a time.
A thought experiment. No artificial neuron exists that could do this.
Where science stands
The maps are getting bigger
The clearest progress is in mapping brains, connection by connection.
| Year | What was mapped | Scale |
|---|---|---|
| 1986 | The whole nervous system of a small worm | 302 neurons |
| 2024 | The whole brain of an adult fruit fly | About 139,000 neurons, over 50 million synapses |
| 2024 | One cubic millimetre of human cortex | About 57,000 cells, 150 million synapses |
| 2025 | One cubic millimetre of mouse visual cortex | About 200,000 cells, with activity recorded first |
| Not yet | A whole human brain | About 86 billion neurons |
The gap is still vast. That single cubic millimetre of human cortex filled 1.4 petabytes, and a whole brain is around a million times larger. Every one of these maps also came from preserved, sliced tissue. No method today can read a living human brain in anything like this detail.
A map is also not a mind. Wiring alone leaves out much of the chemistry and activity that make a brain work.
There is also no agreed way to measure whether anything is conscious. Without one, no move could ever be proven.
A first sketch
How the work might unfold
This will change as we learn. There are no dates, because any date today would be invented.
- You are here
Set out the question
Put the concept in the open and say plainly what is unknown.
Understand consciousness
Gather what is known across neuroscience, philosophy, computing and ethics, and find the people doing the best work.
Chart the chemistry of feeling
Study how chemistry, mood and experience change together over time, with data given freely by consenting research volunteers.
Define success
Decide what evidence could ever show a person had continued, and not merely been copied.
Write the vessel specification
Set out exactly what a vessel must provide, job by job, whatever form it takes, using only safe research with volunteers who stay in their own bodies.
Follow the hard science
Support or join work on reading and modelling brains, starting far below human scale.
Ground rules
What we will hold ourselves to
- Evidence before claims. We will say what is known, and say so again when it changes.
- Nothing to buy. Nothing here is for sale, and no one will be asked to pay for a future that does not exist.
- Your data stays out of it. This project does not use any Heaven Health member data.
- Your body comes first. Nothing here replaces medical care or changes how much your life and health matter today.
Sources
- Chalmers, D. (1995). Facing up to the problem of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies.
- Pritschet et al. (2020). Functional reorganization of brain networks across the human menstrual cycle. NeuroImage 220.
- Moncrieff et al. (2022). The serotonin theory of depression: a systematic umbrella review of the evidence. Molecular Psychiatry.
- Yano et al. (2015). Indigenous bacteria from the gut microbiota regulate host serotonin biosynthesis. Cell. Paper
- Midbrain dopamine neuron numbers: review in Frontiers in Molecular Neuroscience (2022). Paper
- White et al. (1986). The structure of the nervous system of the nematode C. elegans. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B.
- Dorkenwald et al. (2024). Neuronal wiring diagram of an adult brain. Nature 634. NIH summary
- Shapson-Coe et al. (2024). A petavoxel fragment of human cerebral cortex reconstructed at nanoscale resolution. Science 384. Paper
- The MICrONS Consortium (2025). Functional connectomics spanning multiple areas of mouse visual cortex. Nature 640. Paper
- Cogitate Consortium (2025). Adversarial testing of global neuronal workspace and integrated information theories of consciousness. Nature 642.
- Azevedo et al. (2009). Equal numbers of neuronal and nonneuronal cells make the human brain an isometrically scaled-up primate brain. J. Comp. Neurol.
- Moravec, H. (1988). Mind Children. Parfit, D. (1984). Reasons and Persons.