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a) We don't need to make an exact copy. We know what happens to matter under different circumstances - different stuff, depending on the circumstances. So it's reasonable to assume that the same would happen to exact copies if they become spatially and temporally separated. Just because we can't make a precise copy of a particle or amalgamation of particles does not provide a sufficient basis to claim otherwise. Because what you're essentially saying here is that we can't disprove God because we don't understand much about the nature of God. Well, that is true, but by no stretch it means that God exists. For all we know God does not exist because there's no good evidence to support God's existence.
b) That's not what this is really about. It's what you try to make it about. For all we know consciousness, awareness or however you want to call it is an emergent feature of a complex enough system.
For example we know that a living being like a worm is aware of its environment as it has to react to changing condition in order to survive. Science has made some amazing steps towards this by trying to emulate a nematode worm on a cellular level with pretty amazing results so far: http://www.artificialbrains.co...
Here again it reasonable to assume that if we have a machine complex enough that can emulate a human body, something like a human awareness would be present.

Answering with snark is not an effective counteragument. You are the one counter-arguing against mainstream science, so the obligation to provide evidence the brain is not a Turing machine is on you.

Mainstream science is already engaged in what you claim to be untrue. Due to technological limitations, they are starting with the brains of very simple organisms, but already researchers have obtained behavior analogous to the emulated organisms. Do you seriously believe that there will be some magic barrier to scaling this up, in time, to primate and eventually human scale brains?

Neuroscientists and computational biologists at mainstream institutions all around the world, from first-rate research universities to commercial labs like at IBM all believe this will happen. I think I'll take their word over that of a random slashdot poster.

I grant that the analogy is far from perfect and depends on many probably-flawed assumptions. While I wasn't suggesting that the only alternative was to halt everything, I think about this subject in the context of "which approach is most likely to yield a virtual human brain soonest". Looking at [what I call] the brute-force approach of understanding how neurons work, understanding how neurons are interconnected, and simulating them, it seems like this ought to be possible in a few decades, maybe even in a century, with only incremental progress and no expectation of revolutionary discovery. Looking at the "let's understand what 'intelligence' really is before we go trying to simulate it" approach, how do you even form an estimate? Inherently, this approach does rely on some revolutionary discovery being made. Perhaps it's just me being a pessimist, but I don't believe we'll ever have an answer for that (forever is a long time, but I say "we" meaning humans-as-they-exist-today), let alone within the next century. While I don't dismiss the value of seeking to gain a fundamental understanding of intelligence, I don't think the goal itself is attainable -- how can we hope to understand something that is many orders of magnitude more complex than anything we've managed to understand before?

But C. Elegans? with only 300 neurons, 7000 synapses? That's old news (though still not quite "complete" in some sense). Though we don't yet have a complete connectome for D melanogaster (it's in the works [sorry for the shitty citation]) nor a complete model for its neurons, but simulation work on its 100000 node CNS is underway regardless. Obviously we won't see virtual flies until this connectome is fully diagrammed and more experimental data about the neurons is available and computers get a bit faster, so indeed it is true that it is too soon to expect these projects to be fully completed. Probably much too soon. But that doesn't mean it's too soon to start, and $0.5B is peanuts when you consider how much a truly successful simulation project is likely to cost.

It's not just the compute power that's a serious limiting factor, but also the availability of imaging technology that would enable us to develop a complete connectome for the brains we seek to simulate. The most immediate hurdle for projects like these isn't our lack of fundamental understanding (although to say that such understanding "would help" would be a huge understatement), it's the combination of insufficient computing resources (though if past trends continue, this won't be an issue for long) combined with insufficient knowledge of the brain's structure (which can be remedied by continuing to advance the state of medical imaging technology, and dfMRI seems very promising recently). Getting more experimental data to develop accurate neuron models for various animals is simply labor-intensive and not really waiting on anything except more funding. However, these are well-defined engineering or funding problems, and steady incremental progress is being made on all of these fronts. I expected this infusion of $0.5B to simply help that along.

We have the technology to invasively/destructively map brains and develop accurate neuronal models today. We have the technology to simulate interconnected neurons today. Progress will continue, but only at the rate at which we fund improvements in these underlying technologies as well as projects that seek to pull together these technologies to shoot for ambitious brain simulations. While I don't doubt that there are other worthy causes to spend this money on (even within neuroscience), I think it's still unfortunate if this particular approach doesn't get the green light because of the actions of one seemingly power-hungry individual.

The Blue brain project have modelled a rats brain down to molecular resolutions, they are now working on a human brain. The project is directed towards medicine not AI, however I believe IBM's Watson is a spin off from the BB project,

I guess this guy hasn't heard about the Open Worm project.

Good, finally an injection of facts in the thread. Yes, a shrew brain actually has the throughput of something like a supercomputer's worth of GPUs, if you believe the estimate of 100 million mips for a human, which is based on an extrapolation of the processing power of the retina. This could be out a few orders of magnitude in either direction, however the point is... we already have the processing power, but not the algorithms, to simulate a shrew. We're getting fairly competent with nematodes but the algorithms don't just scale up, there remain algorithms used by natural brains that we don't yet have the slightest clue of.

However, the funny thing is that even if it was the case that quantum effects play a large part in consciousness, it's still in the realm of physics, not God.

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Well, I guess it was just a matter of time. Now we have artificial hearts (pop-up warning), artificial lungs, and artificial kidneys. (I mean that we as a society have them available to us as a technology, not that we as individuals actually have those things inside us, though some of us no doubt do.)

How long before we also have artificial skin to hold our artificial hair? How long before we decide what to put in our artifcial stomachs with our artificial brains?

The human race is about to step aside to make room for the cybernetically enhanced. May God have mercy on our souls. My one request is that none of my organs run anything made by Microsoft. See you in the future.