The organization of human thought to achieve that level of understanding might be an issue. From the original article: 'the data footprint of all books ever written come out to less than 100 terabytes, or 0.005 percent of a mouse brain'
That formulation makes the goal seem remote but not implausible. We have the technology to index and analyse 10 Terrabytes certainly and even gmail apparently is an exabyte ... [0]. A mouse brain given your premise is 20 petabytes. Given even linear progress this class of problem is not insurmountable.
That is a cute aphorism, but there is no empirical evidence one way or the other. If you are thinking that it is obviously too much information for a brain to know itself, note that most of what we understand about complex systems, such as the weather, is understood using only a miniscule fraction of the total information present. That is the power of abstraction.
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"If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't."
A mind understanding itself may violate the second law, but a few minds understanding one mind should be theoretically possible!
The organization of human thought to achieve that level of understanding might be an issue. From the original article: 'the data footprint of all books ever written come out to less than 100 terabytes, or 0.005 percent of a mouse brain'
That formulation makes the goal seem remote but not implausible. We have the technology to index and analyse 10 Terrabytes certainly and even gmail apparently is an exabyte ... [0]. A mouse brain given your premise is 20 petabytes. Given even linear progress this class of problem is not insurmountable.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exa-
That is a cute aphorism, but there is no empirical evidence one way or the other. If you are thinking that it is obviously too much information for a brain to know itself, note that most of what we understand about complex systems, such as the weather, is understood using only a miniscule fraction of the total information present. That is the power of abstraction.