somasimple, I think you're missing the point. Moonbear is not at all denying that it would be astronomically difficult to do something like creating a (virtually) identical copy of a brain. Nor is she denying that we have absolutely no means to do this given our current knowledge and technology. She is just maintaining that it might not be categorically impossible for this to be done. Inordinately improbable yes, but not necessarily impossible in principle, at least on some interpretations of the initial question. Again-- assume humanity doesn't annihilate itself but rather continues to progress in knowledge and technology in an unbounded fashion (or give some arbitrarily long time scale like a billion years), and it's no longer at all clear exactly what would be possible and impossible for such an advanced society. Certainly the catalogue of what such a society could do would include many things that today we might think impossible.
