Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston

It's currently an open scientific question what level of biological detail an emulation needs to capture.

It's unlikely we'd need to simulate every ion channel, and perhaps much of the brain's physiology could be simplified with no consequence.

But the key feature of the emulation approach is the guarantee.

If you've faithfully recreated the causal mechanisms down to the necessary level, the resulting behavior is trustworthy by construction.

Low-fidelity approaches might produce correct-looking behavior in some cases, but it's hard to tell to what degree this will generalize to novel situations.

In response to this line of criticism, Michael Andreg has argued that uploading shouldn't be considered so binary.

I don't think of uploading as a binary concept, he told The Verge, outlining the different levels of upload.

By this logic then, Eon's system, containing connectome-derived elements driving behavior in a virtual body, might qualify as a partial upload.

But if a connectome-constrained model can count as a partial upload, then the Shu et al.

brain model was already a partial upload before Eon touched it.

So was the Lapelainen visual model.

So, for that matter, is any computational neuroscience model that incorporates anatomical connectivity data.

The word uploader loses its distinctive meaning, and the field loses its ability to communicate what it is actually trying to achieve and how far away a true fly upload still is.

Heading.

Still loading.

When the vocabulary of breakthroughs is spent on incremental demos, the actual breakthroughs are cheapened when they arrive.

Funders and the public lose the ability to distinguish genuine milestones from slick demos, and investment flows towards groups making the boldest claims rather than those doing the most foundational work.

Worse, for a field that is struggling to graduate from science fiction to serious research, premature claims risk triggering the cycle of hype and disillusionment that has set back other ambitious programs before.

To be fair, we're not unsympathetic to why E.ON used the language they did.

Their careful blog post on how the Eon team produced a virtual embodied fly would likely have only been read by a few hundred neuroscientists, whilst we've uploaded a fruit fly reached millions.