I read "Lobsters" by Charles Stross last night, a story where lobster nervous system states are uploaded to a neural net. If you know me, you know I'm an enthusiastic extropian. Following the logic that upload technology would probably proceed from simpler nervous systems to more complex, I thought I would look into what's been happening with Pleurobranchaea which I vaguely recalled from Godel Escher Bach as having simple nervous systems with big neurons making them a favorite for experimentation in the lab. R. Gillette Lab has a nifty model of Pleurobranchaea behavior they call Cyberbranchaea. This isn't uploading, but it's a big step in the right direction.
We are still a very long way from knowing what to upload but we seem to be learning more about how. I'm not a scientist, but I think we'll have to do quite a bit more than simulate neurons to faithfully reproduce an evolved lifeform. There's the endocrine system for one thing which greatly influences our emotional state, and the full set of senses and appendages which make up a large part of what we think we are. There's the whole granularity question of digital simulation of analog systems. What's an acceptable A/D conversion for a thought? It may be that we'll find most of this can be treated as a black box where we can simulate just the neuron firing in a given situation and indirectly capture the entire state of the organism due to the influence of all other factors being reflected in the neuron state, but that seems like wishful thinking.
The nice thing about science is that my opinion is irrelevant. The tough part is the ethics of the experimentation. How can we tell if a simulation "feels" alive? What rights does a simulation have? Do Cyberbranchaea Dream of Electric Flabellina?
I'm wrong about first reading about Pleurobranchaea neurons in G.E.B/E.G.B. Anybody have an idea what book it might have been?