We Built a Brain Computer (and Sent It to Space) | James Tagg - SF Deep Tech Week 2025

Presented by Valis Corp at SF Deep Tech Week 2025 (https://luma.com/valis-2025)
https://www.valiscorp.com/


Deep Tech Week is a decentralized conference hosting the worlds best entrepreneurs and investors bringing science fiction technologies to life
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“Scratch your skin, grow a mini-brain, teach it, then send it to space.”

At Deep Tech Week SF 2025, James Tagg unveils a bold program to build a quantum bio-computer using human brain organoids — and to run physics-of-consciousness experiments that probe Penrose–Hameroff (Orch-OR) with real mass movement and partial measurement on an IBM quantum computer.

What’s inside the talk:
• 🧫 Brain organoids → bio-computers: reprogrammed skin cells arranged in scalable arrays (e.g., 32×32) to model cortical function, enable one-shot learning, and operate at ultra-low power.
• 🚀 Why space?: organoids mature dramatically faster on the ISS (30 days ≈ years of maturation), enabling studies of memory formation and aging that are impractical on Earth.
• 🧪 Objective reduction tests: a two-stage setup (ultra-light “proto-measurement” + mass-moving mirrors) and a reproducible Qiskit circuit where partial measurement + gravitational amplification trends outcome distributions toward 50:50, consistent with objective collapse predictions.
• 🔐 Crypto/complexity angle: why a quantum bio-computer could attack hard cryptographic problems in novel ways (speculative but intriguing).
• 🧬 Space biomedicine: organoids in orbit show inflammatory signatures that inspired a repurposing path for antiretrovirals in an X-linked neurodevelopmental disorder (the transcript says “Tourette”; context suggests Rett syndrome — X-linked, primarily affecting girls).
• 🧟 Radiation resilience: experiments with a tardigrade-gene splice (DSRP) in human organoids to separate cosmic-ray effects from microgravity effects.

Tagg’s vision: Brain-as-a-Service — a platform where organoid arrays learn, remember, and interface with classical/quantum systems, while spaceflight accelerates discovery in aging and neurology.

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🎙 Speaker — James Tagg
Entrepreneur, inventor, and deep-tech researcher exploring the boundary between computation and consciousness. Tagg develops organoid-based computing platforms and experimental tests of the Orch-OR framework, including mass-amplified partial-measurement circuits on commercial quantum hardware.