Anthony Movshon's opening points on the contra side of the brain mapping debate with Sebastian Seung

1) Scale mismatch between the synapse-synapse level and the kind of description you want to acquire about the nervous system for a particular goal. He argues that the point at which the interesting neural computation works might be at the mesoscale. It might be enough to know the statistics of how nerve cells work at the synapse level if you want to predict behavior.

2) Structure-function relationships are elusive in the nervous system. It's harder to understand the information that is being propagated to the nervous system because its purpose is so much more nebulous than a typical organ, like a kidney.

3) Computation-substrate relationships are elusive in general. The structure of an information processing machine doesn't tell you about the processing it performs. For example, you can analyze in finest detail the microprocessor structure in a computer, and it will constrain the possible ways it can act, but it won't tell you what actual operating system it is using.

Here is a link to the video of Movshon's opening remarks. He also mentions the good-if-true point that the set of connections of C. elegans is known, but our understanding of its physiology hasn't "been materially enhanced" by having that connectome.

The rest of the debate was entertaining but not all that vitriolic. Movshon and Seung do not appear to disagree on all that much.

I personally lean towards Seung's side. This is not so much due to the specifics (many of which can be successfully quibbled with), but rather due to the reference class of genomics, a set of technologies and methods which have proven to be very fruitful and well worth the investment.