Might whole brain emulation require quantum-level emulation?

Well, to one extent of course it will, since ion pumps and neurotransmitter-sensors run entirely on quantum mechanics, just like chlorophyll. The question for a simulation would seem to be whether we can model each and each instance of these things seperately, thus neatly cordoning off the quantum mechanics. Simulating a tree, for example, can be done quite well above the quantum level, because even though chlorophyll's properties depend on QM, once you know the properties you can model it without further reference to quantum mechanics.

Our models of individual neurons behave a lot like what neurons behave like. Similarly, fairly crude models of the laminar pattern seem to mimic it very well. It is possible that there are other subtle effects that we aren't noticing but that seems difficult.

On the other hand, evolution is very good at finding clever tricks, and we know that there has been a fair bit of evolution concerning our brains. So, it isn't at all implausible that evolution at some point found a clever way to use quantum effects.Moreover, given that we know that there are genes active in the brain that are slightly different among the great apes from the versions in other mammals and still others that are different in humans from the other great apes, one could hypothesize in a not completely unlikely that this is part of the difference between humans and other species.

However, there are two separate issue from QM effects that could make emulation more difficult: first, there's growing evidence that not just neurons but also glial cells matter to cognition. Second, there's some reason to think that neurons can interact with nearby neurons by their electromagnetic fields. Either one of these issues could drastically increase the amount of computation needed to run an emulation.

Upvoted for the references to bird navigation and quantum smell. Those will probably be the most interesting things I'll learn all day.

Voted up because I think many people might vote it down incorrectly due to not getting the "joke"; That it might indeed mean you need to simulate quantum event, but not implying this to be an argument against the practicality of EMs. Sort of, I'm not very good at communicating this kind of subtle artsy concept with words.

The problem of emulating human "minds" might be much more difficult than just emulating the human brain. Here are three quotes that will highlight why this might be the case:

What we call "mind" is really embodied. There is no true separation of mind and body. These are not two independent entities that somehow come together and couple. The word "mental" picks out those bodily capacities and performances that constitute our awareness and determine our creative and constructive responses to the situation we encounter. Mind isn't some mysterious abstract entity that we bring to bear on our experience. Rather, mind is part of the very structure and fabric of our interactions with our world.

Philosophy in the Flesh, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson

They say the division between mind and environment is less rigid than previously thought; the mind uses information within the environment as an extension of itself.

While a person can learn a route through a maze and then negotiate the maze by memory, a person would appear equally smart to an outsider if they simply followed signposts in the maze to reach the exit. "A smart person, like the droplets, is often smart due to canny combinations of internal and external structure," says Clark.

What a maze-solving oil drop tells us of intelligence (Original)

It’s widely thought that human language evolved in universally similar ways, following trajectories common across place and culture, and possibly reflecting common linguistic structures in our brains. But a massive, millennium-spanning analysis of humanity’s major language families suggests otherwise.

Instead, language seems to have evolved along varied, complicated paths, guided less by neurological settings than cultural circumstance. If our minds do shape the evolution of language, it’s likely at levels deeper and more nuanced than many researchers anticipated.

“It’s terribly important to understand human cognition, and how the human mind is put together,” said Michael Dunn, an evolutionary linguist at Germany’s Max Planck Institute and co-author of the new study, published April 14 in Nature. The findings “do not support simple ideas of the mind as a computer, with a language processor plugged in. They support much-more complex ideas of how language arises.”

Evolution of Language Takes Unexpected Turn (See also, Is Grammar More Cultural Than Universal? Study Challenges Chomsky’s Theory)

Even more: Embodied cognition

I don't know what to make of this as I haven't done any research into it but I thought it should be accounted for when one wants to talk about the emulation of "minds". It seems a lot of what makes us human, intelligent and what shapes our languages, values and goals seems to be a complex interrelationship between our brain, body, culture and the environment.

I'm not sure I should care about whole-brain emulation itself, so much as whole-brain scanning and connectome mapping. Whole-brain is one of two possible paths from that to immortality (which is the part I care about), the other being to print/assemble a new biological brain with the same set of neural connections.

To me, the brain-printing route seems to depend on fewer unresolved questions about the universe than the brain-emulation route, e.g. how much computing power can be packed in a reasonable amount of space and whether you need to simulate advanced biophysics in detail to accurately simulate the human mind.