You'd have to ask someone who believes in such a supernatural influence, where it intervenes. You'd also have to ask the materialist how they determined that they were replacing neurons with physically equivalent devices. It's difficult to determine the input-output behaviour of a single component when it's embedded in a complex machine whose overall operation one knows very little about, and cutting it out to analyse it might destroy its ablity to respond to the supernatural forces.
As context to these remarks, I've read some of the discussion between Rolf Andreassen and John C Wright on the latter's blog, and whatever I might think of supernatural stuff, I must agree with Wright that Rolf is persistently smuggling his materialist assumptions into his arguments and then pulling them out as the conclusion.
It seems to me that most AI researchers on this site are patternists in the sense of believing that the anti-zombie principle necessarily implies:
1. That it will ever become possible *in practice* to create uploads or sims that are close enough to our physical instantiations that their utility to us would be interchangeable with that of our physical instantiations.
2. That we know (or will know) enough about the brain to know when this threshold is reached.
But, like any rationalists extrapolating from unknown unknowns... or heck, extrapolating from anything... we must admit that one or both of the above statements could be wrong without also making friendly AI impossible. What would be the consequences of such error?
I submit that one such consequence could be an FAI that is also wrong on these issues but not only do we fail to check for such a failure mode, it actually looks to us like what we would expect the right answer to look because we are making the same error.
If simulation/uploading really does preserve what we value about our lives then the safest course of action is to encourage as many people to upload as possible. It would also imply that efforts to solve the problem of mortality by physical means will at best be given an even lower priority than they are now, or at worst cease altogether because they would seem to be a waste of resources.
Result: people continue to die and nobody including the AI notices, except now they have no hope of reprieve because they think the problem is already solved.
Pessimistic Result: uploads are so widespread that humanity quietly goes extinct, cheering themselves onward the whole time
Really Pessimistic Result: what replaces humanity are zombies, not in the qualia sense but in the real sense that there is some relevant chemical/physical process that is not being simulated because we didn't realize it was relevant or hadn't noticed it in the first place.
Possible Safeguards:
* Insist on quantum level accuracy (yeah right)
* Take seriously the general scenario of your FAI going wrong because you are wrong in the same way and fail to notice the problem.
* Be as cautious about destructive uploads as you would be about, say, molecular nanotech.
* Make sure you knowledge of neuroscience is at least as good as you knowledge of computer science and decision theory before you advocate digital immortality as anything more than an intriguing idea that might not turn out to be impossible.