Seeing red

[bennyboy]

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.

This is the argument in QM or in general with the "butterfly effect."  The idea is that in very complex systems, even though things normally average out, there are so many events that SOMETIMES a tiny variation snowballs.  It comes down to arguments about determinism, because we can never actually know whether the chaos could have turned out any other way than it has.

Consider whether a brain is really a binary device or whether it functions as an analogue device (I'd argue it has components of both, actually).  Then consider the concept of constructive interference in waves, and the fact of rogue waves (aka the "perfect storm").  In binary systems, you'll never get a perfect storm.  In GENERAL, the complexity of the ocean leads to relatively uniform waves over the surface, but due to very-small-chance statistical interactions, you sometimes get harmonics that lead to freak incidents.

So even if people disregard the butterfly effect in general, in any system with sufficient complexity, and given that it is not digital, you will sometimes end up with unpredictable results.