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Emile comments on The Importance of Self-Doubt - Less Wrong
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I'm not sure about what you mean about the "complete blueprints" - I agree that the DNA isn't a complete blueprint, and that an alien civilization with a different chemistry would (probably) find it impossible to rebuild a human if they were just given it's DNA. The gestational environment is essential, I just don't think it encodes much data on the actual working of the brain.
It seems to me that the interaction between the baby and the gestational environment is relatively simple, at least compared to organ development and differentiation. There are a lot of essential things for it to go right, and hormones and nutrients, but 1) I don't see a lot of information transfer in there ("making the brain work a certain way" as opposed to "making the brain work period"), and 2) A lot of the information on how that works is probably encoded in the DNA too.
I would say that the important bits that may not be in the DNA (or in mitocondrial DNA) are the DNA interpretation system (transcription, translation).
That's a strong point, but I think it's still worth bearing in mind that this subject is P. Z. Myers' actual research focus: developmental biology. It appears to me that Kurzweil should be getting Myers' help revising his 50 MB estimate*, not dismissing Myers arguments as misinformed.
Yes, Myers made a mistake in responding to a summary secondhand account rather than Kurzweil's actual position, but Kurzweil is making a mistake if he's ignoring expert opinion on a subject directly relating to his thesis.
* By the way: 50 MB? That's smaller than the latest version of gcc! If that's your complexity estimate, the complexity of the brain could be dominated by the complexity of the gestational environment!
I agree that Kurzweil could have acknowledged P.Z.Myers' expertise a bit more, especially the "nobody in my field expects a brain simulation in the next ten years" bit.
50 MB - that's still a hefty amount of code, especially if it's 50MB of compiled code and not 50 MB of source code (comparing the size of the source code to the size of the compressed DNA looks fishy to me, but I'm not sure Kurzweil has been actually doing that - he's just been saying "it doesn't require trillions of lines of code").
Is the size of gcc the source code or the compiled version? I didn't see that info on Wikipedia, and don't have gcc on this machine.
As I see it, Myers delivered a totally misguided rant. When his mistakes were exposed he failed to apologise. Obviously, there is no such thing as bad publicity.
I'm looking at gcc-4.5.0.tar.gz.
That includes the source code, the binaries, the documentation, the unit tests, changelogs ... I'm not surpised it's pretty big!
I consider it pretty likely that it's possible to program a human-like intelligence with a compressed source code of less than 50 MB.
However, I'm much less confident that the source code of the first actual human-like intelligence coded by humans (if there is one) will be that size.