I was wondering about that. It seems that the number represents the size of the phase space, when a more useful metric would be the size (Kolmogorov complexity) of the average point *in* the phase space. There is a world of difference between the number of patterns that can be encoded and the size of the biggest pattern that can be encoded; the former isn't terribly important, but the latter is very important.
Are you talking about the "average" point in the phase space in the sense of an average empirical human brain, or in the sense of a randomly selected point in the phase space? I assume you mean the former, since, for the latter question, if you have a simple program P that produces a phase space of size 2^X, the average size of a random point in the phase space must be roughly X (plus the size of P?) according to both Shannon and Kolmogorov.
(Incidentally, I'll join in expressing my astonishment and dismay at the level of sheer mathematical and physical and computational ignorance on the part of authors and reviewers that must have been necessary for even the abstract of this paper to make it past the peer review process, and add that the result violates the Susskind holographic bound for an object that can be contained in a 1-meter sphere - no more than 10^70 bits of information.)
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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