What level of granularity of fidelity are you referring to?
These physicists say they have *mathematical* proof that this is not possible.
86 billion neurons, 100 trillion connections, and each connection modulated by dozens of different neurotransmitters and action potential levels and uncounted timing sequences (and that's just what I remember off the top of my head from undergrad neuroscience courses decades ago).
It hasn't even been done for a single pair of neurons because all the variables are not yet understood. All the neural nets use only the most oversimplified version of what a neuron does — merely a binary fire/don't fire algo with training-adjusted weights.
Even assuming all the neurotransmitters, action potentials, and timing sequences, and internal biochemistry of each neuron type (and all the neuron-supporting cells) were understood and simulate-able, using all 250 billion GPUs shipped in 2024 [0] to each simulate a neuron and all its connections, neurotransmitters and timings, it'd take 344 years to accumulate 86 billion of them to simulate one brain.
Even if the average connection between neurons is one foot long, to simulate 100 trillion connections is 18 billion miles of wire. Even if the average connection is 0.3mm, that's 18 million miles of wire.
I'm not even going to bother back-of-the-envelope calculating the power to run all that.
The point is it is not even close to happening until we achieve many orders of magnitude greater computation density.
Will many useful things be achieved before that level of integration? Absolutely, just these oversimplified neural nets are producing useful things.
But just as we can conceptually imagine faster-than-light travel, imagining full-fidelity human brain simulation (which is not the same as good-enough-to-be-useful or good-enough-to-fool-many-people) is only maybe a bit closer to reality.
[0] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/more-than-251-mil...
As with angels on the head of a pin, the interesting argument is whether the amount of compute is finite or not, not how finite it is.
And, considering the visible universe is also finite, with finite amounts of matter and energy, it would follow ultimate compute quantity is also finite, unless there is an argument for compute without energy or matter, and/or unlimited compute being made available from outside the visible universe or our light cone. I don't know of any such valid arguments, but perhaps you can point to some?