Fair enough, although multiple people downvoted that comment (it seems to have had some upvotes since to compensate). Even if they downvoted for different reasons though, that's still at least one counterexample of someone who fits into the category "folks who expect WBE".

Emulation without simulation would require not only vastly more understanding of the brain and of cell biology than we have now (most of the problems Myers points out would still be there, though not all) but on top of that all the problems you hit when trying to emulate one system on another, plus a whole lot of problems no-one's ever even conceived because no-one's ever ported an algorithm (for which we have neither source code nor documentation) from a piece of meat to silicon.