Can't find it now, I am sorry. But I remember the number 2^8000 or there about bytes, mentioned a few years ago as an estimation by some scientist. Neurologist. Now it is impossible to find it, since Google can't search "2^8* ... bytes ... brains" type of a string. Or some regular expressions or something.
Are you saying that they are wrong when they say that womb environment impacts intelligence and sexual preference
I am saying, that there is at the most a very tiny amount of the information flow, even if the womb can make you smarter or dumber. If a lightning strikes and makes somebody a 10 IQ points smarter - what I can see as a possibility - the amount of information by the thunder is about zero.
Paul Christiano recently suggested that we can use neuroimaging to form a complete mathematical characterization of a human brain, which a sufficiently powerful superintelligence would be able to reconstruct into a working mind, and the neuroimaging part is already possible today, or close to being possible.
Paul was using this idea as part of an FAI design proposal, but I'm highlighting it here since it seems to have independent value as an alternative or supplement to cryonics. That is, instead of (or in addition to) trying to get your body to be frozen and then preserved in liquid nitrogen after you die, you periodically take neuroimaging scans of your brain and save them to multiple backup locations (1010 bits is only about 1 gigabyte), in the hope that a friendly AI or posthuman will eventually use the scans to reconstruct your mind.
Are there any neuroimaging experts around who can tell us how feasible this really is, and how much such a scan might cost, now or in the near future?
ETA: Given the presence of thermal noise and the fact that a set of neuroimaging data may contain redundant or irrelevant information, 1010 bits ought to be regarded as just a rough lower bound on how much data needs to be collected and stored. Thanks to commenters who pointed this out.