The problem of emulating human "minds" might be much more difficult than just emulating the human brain. Here are three quotes that will highlight why this might be the case:
What we call "mind" is really embodied. There is no true separation of mind and body. These are not two independent entities that somehow come together and couple. The word "mental" picks out those bodily capacities and performances that constitute our awareness and determine our creative and constructive responses to the situation we encounter. Mind isn't some mysterious abstract entity that we bring to bear on our experience. Rather, mind is part of the very structure and fabric of our interactions with our world.
Philosophy in the Flesh, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
They say the division between mind and environment is less rigid than previously thought; the mind uses information within the environment as an extension of itself.
While a person can learn a route through a maze and then negotiate the maze by memory, a person would appear equally smart to an outsider if they simply followed signposts in the maze to reach the exit. "A smart person, like the droplets, is often smart due to canny combinations of internal and external structure," says Clark.
What a maze-solving oil drop tells us of intelligence (Original)
It’s widely thought that human language evolved in universally similar ways, following trajectories common across place and culture, and possibly reflecting common linguistic structures in our brains. But a massive, millennium-spanning analysis of humanity’s major language families suggests otherwise.
Instead, language seems to have evolved along varied, complicated paths, guided less by neurological settings than cultural circumstance. If our minds do shape the evolution of language, it’s likely at levels deeper and more nuanced than many researchers anticipated.
“It’s terribly important to understand human cognition, and how the human mind is put together,” said Michael Dunn, an evolutionary linguist at Germany’s Max Planck Institute and co-author of the new study, published April 14 in Nature. The findings “do not support simple ideas of the mind as a computer, with a language processor plugged in. They support much-more complex ideas of how language arises.”
Evolution of Language Takes Unexpected Turn (See also, Is Grammar More Cultural Than Universal? Study Challenges Chomsky’s Theory)
Even more: Embodied cognition
I don't know what to make of this as I haven't done any research into it but I thought it should be accounted for when one wants to talk about the emulation of "minds". It seems a lot of what makes us human, intelligent and what shapes our languages, values and goals seems to be a complex interrelationship between our brain, body, culture and the environment.
Most of the quotes above (at least, the ones that make sense) are talking about the way that intelligence grows in the first place, not about what would happen if you changed the context for a grown adult brain. Since a person paralyzed in an accident or stroke can nevertheless keep their mental faculties, it seems that changing the connection between the brain and its body/environment need not destroy the intellect that's already formed.
Also, it would be pretty reasonable to simulate some kind of body and environment (in less detail than one simulates the brain) while you're at it. Would that address your query?
Most experts seem to think that whole brain emulation will not require emulation down to the quantum level, but perhaps at the level of atoms or even molecules, either of which is far more computationally tractable than quantum-level brain emulation. Those who think quantum-level emulation will be required for whole brain emulation are often considered to be cranks.
However, it is worth noting that a few biological processes - including photosynthesis - have recently been found [excellent video lecture] to depend on the particularities of quantum phenomena. This lends no support to Penrose's views on quantum phenomena and the brain, but it may not be so crankish after all to suppose that whole brain emulation may require emulation down to the quantum level.
Thoughts?
Links:
On photosynthesis, see Fleming's papers on the topic.
Here is the quantum bird navigation paper.
Here is some coverage on Turin's controversial theory of quantum smell.