Does anyone agree?
With the claim, or it being extraordinary? Anyway, I agree with both.
The idea that the mind is in essence about patterns. Does that include the metabolism of the neurons for example? The idea that the mind is separable form any given brain and body is where I call shenanigans.
The International Journal of Machine Consciousness recently published its special issue on mind uploading. The papers are paywalled, but as the editor of the issue, Ben Goertzel has put together a page that links to the authors' preprints of the papers. Preprint versions are available for most of the papers.
Below is a copy of the preprint page as it was at the time that this post was made. Note though that I'll be away for a couple of days, and thus be unable to update this page if new links get added.