With regards to animal experimentation before first upload and so on, a running upload is nothing but fancy processing of a scan of, likely, a cadaver brain, legally no different from displaying that brain on computer, and doesn't require any sort of FDA style stringent functionality testing on animals, not that such testing would help for a brain much bigger, with different neuron sizes, and with the failure modes that are highly non-obvious in animals. Nor that such regulation is even necessary, as the scanned upload of dead person, functional enough to recognize his family, is a definite improvement over being completely dead, and to prevent it equates mercy killing accident victims who have good prospect at full recovery, to avoid the mere discomfort of being sick.
The gradual progress on humans is pretty much a certainty, if one is to drop the wide eyed optimism bias. There are enough people who would bite the bullet, and it is not human experimentation - it is mere data processing - it might become human experimentation decades after functional uploads.
There's a consensus here that conscious computer programs have the same moral weight as people, so getting uploading moderately wrong in some directions is worse than getting it completely wrong.
In this video, long about 48:00, Eliezer talks about uploading and about how it wouldn't be murder if his meat body were anesthetized before the upload and killed without regaining consciousness.
It's arguable that it wouldn't be murder, but I'm not clear about why Eliezer would want to do it that way. I've got some guesses about why one might want to not let the meat body wake up (legal and practical complications of a double but diverging identity, the meat version feeling hopelessly envious), but I'm not sure whether either of them apply.
On the other hand, I can think of a couple of reasons for *not* eliminating the meat version-- one is that two Eliezers would presumably be better than one, though I don't have a strong intuition about the optimum number of Eliezers. The other, which I consider to be more salient, is that the meat version is a backup in case the upload isn't as good as hoped.
More generally, what would folks here consider to be good enough evidence that uploading was worth doing?