How real is a simulated brain of a real person?

[vernes]

The problem will start when you turn on the simulation.
The simulation will run and at that moment, you'll have a simulation of the neuro-activity that also happens in a real brain.
Different material, same data.
Should the simulation include this, the simulated brain can send the muscle signals that would have formed sound with the mouth, tong, lungs an voicebox.
Should the simulation run correctly, the voice will ask what went wrong during the mri-scan.
Or whatever scan was used to get the chemical state of the neurons.

Would stopping the simulation be concidered a murder? or keeping a man unconcious?

Not to mention the question how to define 'me' when two information systems (brains) both claim to be thesame 'me'.
The continuation of ones awareness is the question here.

What good is simulating a person's brain? Would that simulation be the person? Or is a transition required to maintain the true 'me' in the simulation?

A nice thought experiment would be that of replacing a brain's neurons for nano-machines, one by one.
Would you be still 'you' if one neuron is replace with a nano-machine with the exact behaviour as the neuron it replaced? And with a 2nd neuron replaced? 3rd? 10th? 1000?
The question becomes less easy to answer until we end up with the last human neuron.
The person of this brain has not experienced an abrupt change, and has had a continued awareness.

[Steffen]

Not to mention the question how to define 'me' when two information systems (brains) both claim to be thesame 'me'. The continuation of ones awareness is the question here.

I just want to say something to this question. I pass on the rest

Imho, two distinct information systems, in this case brains, cannot claim to be the same 'me'. They are distinct systems and therefore are distinct 'me's'. What they CAN claim is the discriptions to be the same. Two brains can both call themselves Barney, be 28y 185d 5h 34m 6sec old, have a wife and two children, work as professional nonworker and so on. But they'll never be the same 'me'.
So if you "copy" ones 'me' (assuming this could be possible) would create an new 'me' and keep the old. In the very moment you pack the information of one system (the one whose awareness continues, as you claimed) into a second system, you created a second 'me' with distinct perceptions, after years perhaps with distinct believes and desires.
Have you seen the movie,where Arnold Schwarzenegger was cloned and wanted his life back, which was taken by the clone (or the other way round )? This gives you an idea of what I mean.

[vernes]

I understand what you mean, and it emphisizes what I mean.
A perfect digitized copy of a brain has no value to the original person without a transition phase.
Should we ever actually benifit from a perfect digitized brain backup, we should have the technology to restore it in phases at different levels.

Structural, informational, etc

Due to the breakdown of our brain, we could lose synaptic connections, makeing us unable to access information.
Although we could make a scan of the information in the unaccessable part of our brain, we still would need to have a connection to it. Using the backup with the neuron-pathways, we could restore the connections as it was during the scan.

Another brain trauma could leave us with the destruction of information containing neurons.
These neurons would need to be removed and replaced with a device that allowed identical connections to be made, and would contain the missing data. (which would simply mean that they would be in thesame state as when the scan was last made.)
Although this phased approach would give the person a feeling of continuation of its 'self', who knows what neurological and psychological complications a person would have to face when parts of his brain suddenly is brought back to a neurological state it was in, 2 month ago? or a year?

On the other hand, if we ever have the technology to get a perfect brainscan, AND the perfect brain simulation, we would be able to test it virtually... or will ethics prevent us from doing so?

[Yocttar]

I would say ethics just cannot stop science.
A copy of the brain? sure.. everything is possiable, aswell as having our cells young forever (which isn't going to be difficult in the next 100 years +-), it all just takes time and alot of it.

The thing is that since forever, it was said people are just dust eventually ("Dust to dust"), today we know that we can create a whole human being from a single cell of our body (with steady support from the enviorment), so anything goes, even having our body and "self" being transmuted into a mechanic organism, but still, being some sort of organism is better then being just dust, as far as im concerned... Getting to think more about the matter can just depress you, so try not to think about it to much and go on with life