Assuming there's no trivial way of mapping our neural networks to hardware chips running binary code, writing the emulator might prove beyond the human mind.
Can our thought processes be abstracted into blocks of a few hundred thousand lines of high level language we might actually be capable of writing?
Perhaps you don't need to. Perhaps you only need to emulate the substrate (neural network, blabla) and then copy an instance of a running brain to it. That may be a lot simpler than understanding the actual processes.
Freeze, dice, slice, scan with an electron microscope, interpolate into a 3D model, analyze into a map of connections, construct the equivalent with software neurons, simulate the sense inputs, throw the on switch.
That's a very interesting paper and appears to confirm that computational power is the least of all the problems - whilst even in 2005 it was possible to run a simulation based on 10^11 random neurons, even the scanning technology we have available at present isn't yet adequate.
Can our thought processes be abstracted into blocks of a few hundred thousand lines of high level language we might actually be capable of writing?