It's not a remotely bold statement. Think about what imagination is, and then think about whether computers can imagine. Computers can't imagine. Computers can't come up with new things because they are programmed. Programming prescribes the outputs to the same limitations as the inputs: it's a closed deterministic system.
You'll see in my comment above this one that I agree that the brain is a physical thing. But abilities and powers are not physical. That's not voodoo magic. That's what abilities are. Think about horsepower. The horsepower of a car does not reside in any one physical thing, not the carburetor, or the intake manifold, or the piston, or the wheels; it's an ability of the car: it is able to go at such and such horsepower. That is what horsepower is.
The same applies to computation. Computing something is an ability, but we have many more intellectual and cognitive abilities beside computing things.
As a result
> a sufficiently powerful computer with a physically accurate simulation of a brain would produce virtually identical results to a real brain.
is just you are assuming that it will work, but nothing about computers supports that in the slightest. That's just a guess.
> A team of scientists able to sufficiently model the physics of the brain (and presumably the entire central nervous system, I imagine a disembodied brain simulation would experience a horrific form of locked-in syndrome) would not need to be concerned about emergent properties of the simulation such as a sense of consciousness, or thought, or imagination. Those things will just happen once the simulation is perfected.
All of this is still an assumption.
Again, that doesn't mean you are right or wrong: it means its an assumption. You have to accept the limitations of your assumption and the limitations of modelling the brain on a computer are large and glaring.
> Indeed the cognitive neuroscience folk, etc, would be invaluable to actually understanding, training, interpreting and caring for the brain simulation, and figuring out if its behaviours and interactions constitute consciousness etc, so I do not think this has to even be framed as programmers pretending to know about brain stuff vs brain people who dismiss any notion of computationally recreating consciousness. It would be a team effort that works both ways, but is already doomed to fail if half the team thinks it's impossible from the get-go.
You are assuming here that only the programmers are heading down the right path. But you don't know that. It's entirely reasonable (and I would say much more supportable) to say that the programmers are heading down the wrong path: their path will lead to nothing at all. That's because the programmers have fallen to a category error.
You think they need to model the brain on a computer for it to make sense. But there is actually very little if anything to support that.
Brains are brains. Computers are computers. That computer science can be fuzzily applied to the study of brains around the ability to compute does not mean the study of brains is computer science or that brains are computers.