From Connectome to Consciousness: Whole-Brain Emulation of Drosophila melanogaster and the Road to Digital Minds

Abstract

Whole-brain emulation (WBE) represents one of the most ambitious frontiers in computational neuroscience: the faithful digital reproduction of a biological nervous system capable of generating autonomous behavior. In March 2026, Eon Systems demonstrated the first embodied whole-brain emulation of an adult Drosophila melanogaster, integrating a connectome-based neural model containing more than 125,000 neurons and approximately 50 million synaptic connections with a physics-simulated body implemented in the MuJoCo environment. The emulated organism exhibited multiple naturalistic behaviors — including locomotion, feeding, and grooming — generated entirely through intrinsic neural dynamics without reinforcement learning or behavior-specific optimization. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the scientific foundations, computational architecture, and experimental significance of this milestone. We trace the historical development of WBE research from early simulations of Caenorhabditis elegans with 302 neurons to the recent Drosophila-scale achievement, and analyze the underlying framework comprising the FlyWire connectome dataset, leaky integrate-and-fire neuronal dynamics, and the NeuroMechFly embodiment system. The review further evaluates the computational and biological challenges associated with scaling toward mammalian and ultimately human brain emulation, including energy requirements, synaptic fidelity, embodiment constraints, and emergent cognition. In addition, the paper examines broader philosophical and ethical implications involving digital consciousness, the simulation hypothesis, and the moral status of potentially sentient synthetic organisms. The findings suggest that large-scale connectomic architecture alone may encode substantial behavioral repertoires, challenging the prevailing assumption that adaptive behavior necessarily depends on extensive learning-based optimization.

Abstract of "From Connectome to Consciousness: Whole-Brain Emulation of Drosophila melanogaster and the Road to Digital Minds" by Zen Revista, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20358153, used under its Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY); markup removed, otherwise unmodified.