Just laying some more groundwork... One distinction the discussion requires:
Who is in control of the components and the environment of the emulation?
Possibilities:
An outside entity, attempting to gain economic or other value by using the emulation to complete information processing tasks. (I'll call this "The Boss.")
-The environment was established to maintain the emulation, which is not "given a job," but was created for scientific observation by outsiders.
-The emulation is not given a job, but environment was created by outsiders as a platform for experimentation on emulations.
-Perhaps the emulation was created as an "upload" of a person, or as their designed child or progeny.
-The emulation has a greater or lesser degree of control over its own environment or composition.
Example of lesser degree of control: It can decide to select some of the content it sees and listens to.
Example of greater degree of control: It can directly alter one of its emotions by "twisting a knob."
Uploads and those creating a WBE-like entity as progeny most likely would prefer to add improvements to a greater or lesser extent, rather than complete fidelity.
Some people may argue that WBEs should lead as natural an existence as possible, one very much like people.
On the assumption that these people value their uploads or progeny, however, some aspects of life experience would be edited out. For example, what would motivate one of these creators to pass their WBEs through an unpleasant end-of-life experience, like vascular dementia?
The emulated lives of uploads and progeny would, to a greater or lesser extent, be edited. We could try to reason more about that.
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.