You could imagine an experimental designs where you train worms to accomplish a particular task (i.e. learn which scent means food. If indeed they use scent. I don’t know.) You then upload both trained and untrained worms. If trained uploads perform better from the get-go than untrained ones, it’s some evidence it’s the same worm. To make it more granular there’s a lot of learning tasks from behavioural neuroscience you could adapt.
You could also do single neuron studies: train the worm on some task, find a neuron that seems to correspond to a particular abstraction. Upload worm; check that the neuron still corresponds to the abstraction.
Or ablation studies: you selectively impair certain neurons in the live trained worm, uploaded worm, and control worms, in a way that causes the same behaviour change only in the target individual.
Optogenetics was exactly the method proposed by David, I just updated the article and included a full quote.
I originally thought my post was already a mere summary of the previous LW posts by jefftk, excessive quotation could make it too unoriginal, interested readers could simply read more by following the links. But I just realized giving sufficient context is important when you’re restarting a forgotten discussion.
You could imagine an experimental designs where you train worms to accomplish a particular task (i.e. learn which scent means food. If indeed they use scent. I don’t know.) You then upload both trained and untrained worms. If trained uploads perform better from the get-go than untrained ones, it’s some evidence it’s the same worm. To make it more granular there’s a lot of learning tasks from behavioural neuroscience you could adapt.
You could also do single neuron studies: train the worm on some task, find a neuron that seems to correspond to a particular abstraction. Upload worm; check that the neuron still corresponds to the abstraction.
Or ablation studies: you selectively impair certain neurons in the live trained worm, uploaded worm, and control worms, in a way that causes the same behaviour change only in the target individual.
Or you can get causal evidence via optogenetics.
Optogenetics was exactly the method proposed by David, I just updated the article and included a full quote.
I originally thought my post was already a mere summary of the previous LW posts by jefftk, excessive quotation could make it too unoriginal, interested readers could simply read more by following the links. But I just realized giving sufficient context is important when you’re restarting a forgotten discussion.