If you don't open this Pandora's box, someone else will. In that case, make copies of yourself and experiment on them. Those copies might have legal rights forbidding you to manipulate them at will, but that just means you do it in secret. For safety and secrecy, provide the experimental copies with virtual realities rather than letting them run around in the real world. After each test run, erase the experimental copy, retaining only whatever data you found useful.
Consent is no longer a meaningful line to draw, since it can be designed to consent to everything.
Uploading, duplication, and modification of persons makes clear what the Buddhists have known for thousands of years, that personal identity is a convenient, conventional fiction. There is not really any such thing. The Buddhists have an answer to this, but I'm not sufficiently enlightened to understand it. The more we find out about the brain, the more a separate mind-stuff seems an unnecessary hypothesis. On the other hand, stories of reincarnation suggest that perhaps something does survive bodily death.