There is a tremendous amount of good material in here, thanks...
The thing that I would like to see added is a perspective on how changeable, or malleable, WBEs would be, once created.
One of the main reasons I am challenging WBEs is because I think that brain emulations would be very easy to change, alter and improve along the axes of defined performance metrics.
If they will be highly malleable, those who wish to use them to generate productivity would instead use improved (neuromorphic) versions. Additionally, a WBE which had some control of its own make-...
I am opening this thread to test the hypothesis that SuperIntelligence is plausible but that Whole-Brain Emulations would most likely become obsolete before they were even possible.
Further, given the ability to do so, entities which were near to being Whole-Brain Emulations would rapidly choose to cease to be near Whole-Brain Emulations and move on to become something else.
I'll let people fire back with discussion and references before presenting more evidence. My hope is to turn this thread into something publishable in the end.