(February 3, 2016 at 8:57 am)bennyboy Wrote: Fair enough. My point is really about a kind of butterfly effect. In a sufficiently complex system, the complexities of classical mechanics will lead to unpredictability. So when we start talking about states and binary decisions, and leave out the chaos (especially as a function of time), I'm not sure whether we are still including the elements essential to the system.
That might be true in a computer system... if one component fails it might bring down the whole thing... but in the brain, redundancy is 'built in' so where I talk about single neurons they're actually populations of neurons, having the effect of averaging out 'noise'. So there's never going to be a place where a single neuron's failure will catastrophically affect the whole network, but rather the signal strength will just weaken with progressive damage to a population of neurons.