Whether C. elegans can be uploaded with particular memories and/or behaviors has no bearing on whether human personal identity is preserved, since the C. elegans nervous system is completely identified—every C. elegans brain grows identically to every other C. elegans brain, so there is no structural wiring differences between one C. elegans and another. “Memories” (better thought of as stimulus-based behavioral divergences in something so small) are not encoded in the C. elegans’ neural pattern at all, the way they are encoded in the human brain; they’re merely held in a sort of ‘active loop’ of neurochemical feedback mechanisms.
It’s certainly possible that the same sort of thing happens with human brains, but on a much more complex scale—but it definitely seems true that human brains actively re-wire our neural interconnections in a way that C. elegans doesn’t.
I wouldn’t say it has no bearing. If C. elegans could NOT be uploaded in a way that preserved behaviors/memories, you would assign a high probability to human brains not being able to be uploaded. So:
If (C. elegans) & ~(Uploading) goes up, then (Human) & ~(Uploading) goes WAY up.
Of course, this commits us to the converse. And since the converse is what happened we would say that it does raise the Human&Uploadable probabilities. Maybe not by MUCH. You rightly point out the dissimilarities that would make it a relatively small increase. But it certainly has some bearing, and in the absense of better evidence it is at least encouraging.
Whether C. elegans can be uploaded with particular memories and/or behaviors has no bearing on whether human personal identity is preserved, since the C. elegans nervous system is completely identified—every C. elegans brain grows identically to every other C. elegans brain, so there is no structural wiring differences between one C. elegans and another. “Memories” (better thought of as stimulus-based behavioral divergences in something so small) are not encoded in the C. elegans’ neural pattern at all, the way they are encoded in the human brain; they’re merely held in a sort of ‘active loop’ of neurochemical feedback mechanisms.
It’s certainly possible that the same sort of thing happens with human brains, but on a much more complex scale—but it definitely seems true that human brains actively re-wire our neural interconnections in a way that C. elegans doesn’t.
I wouldn’t say it has no bearing. If C. elegans could NOT be uploaded in a way that preserved behaviors/memories, you would assign a high probability to human brains not being able to be uploaded. So:
If (C. elegans) & ~(Uploading) goes up, then (Human) & ~(Uploading) goes WAY up.
Of course, this commits us to the converse. And since the converse is what happened we would say that it does raise the Human&Uploadable probabilities. Maybe not by MUCH. You rightly point out the dissimilarities that would make it a relatively small increase. But it certainly has some bearing, and in the absense of better evidence it is at least encouraging.