The future of AI will come out very differently if sections of neural tissue cannot be made to function usefully, separately from from a WBE.
Similarly, the future of AI will come out very differently if removing parts of the brain from an emulation causes the brain to become non-functional.
We know from studies of stroke and other forms of brain damage that brain function does not immediately degrade if a small section of brain is injured. Therefore, removing sections from a WBE might reduce the functionality of the WBE, but would not diminish it entirely.
There is no precedent for adding sections of brain matter to an existing brain. If such operations were performed on a WBE, however, the changes would be very different than they would be to actual brain tissue.
Brain grafts are a very difficult idea in actual brain tissue today.
One of the key reasons, however, will begin to become a non-factor: tissue rejection. We can now grow neurons that have the same genetic code as yours or mine in the lab (I actually did this.) A method is to turn induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) which may have been created from your own skin, into nerve cells.
I grew a small plate of such cells. I did not try to distinguish which among them were neurons, and which were glia. I am sure how far along we are toward growing a complete...
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.