To that first sentence, I don’t want to get lost in semantics here. My specific statement is that the process that takes DNA into a human is probabilistic with respect to the DNA sequence alone. Add in all that other stuff, and maybe at some point it becomes deterministic, but at that point you are no longer discussing the <1GB that makes DNA. If you wanted to be truly deterministic, especially up to the age of 25, I seriously doubt it could be done in less than millions of petabytes, because there are such a huge number of miniscule variations in conditions and I suspect human development is a highly chaotic process.
As you said, though, we’re at the point of minor nitpicks here. It doesn’t have to be a deterministic encoding for your broader points to stand.
Perhaps I phrased it poorly, let me put it this way.
If super-advanced aliens suddenly showed up tomorrow and gave us the near-physically-perfectly technology, machines, techniques, etc., we could feasibly have a fully deterministic, down to the cell level at least, encoding of any possible individual human stored in a box of hard drives or less.
In practical terms I can’t even begin to imagine the technology needed to reliably and repeatably capture a ‘snapshot’ of a living, breathing, human’s cellular state, but there’s no equivalent of a light speed barrier preventing it.
To that first sentence, I don’t want to get lost in semantics here. My specific statement is that the process that takes DNA into a human is probabilistic with respect to the DNA sequence alone. Add in all that other stuff, and maybe at some point it becomes deterministic, but at that point you are no longer discussing the <1GB that makes DNA. If you wanted to be truly deterministic, especially up to the age of 25, I seriously doubt it could be done in less than millions of petabytes, because there are such a huge number of miniscule variations in conditions and I suspect human development is a highly chaotic process.
As you said, though, we’re at the point of minor nitpicks here. It doesn’t have to be a deterministic encoding for your broader points to stand.
Perhaps I phrased it poorly, let me put it this way.
If super-advanced aliens suddenly showed up tomorrow and gave us the near-physically-perfectly technology, machines, techniques, etc., we could feasibly have a fully deterministic, down to the cell level at least, encoding of any possible individual human stored in a box of hard drives or less.
In practical terms I can’t even begin to imagine the technology needed to reliably and repeatably capture a ‘snapshot’ of a living, breathing, human’s cellular state, but there’s no equivalent of a light speed barrier preventing it.