(February 3, 2016 at 7:36 pm)bennyboy Wrote:(February 3, 2016 at 9:14 am)Emjay Wrote: 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.
Yeah, I understand what you mean. Rational AKD was talking about all this stuff as well... QM effects in the brain... microtubules etc. I accept that there could be quantum effects in the brain, and following that discussion, that they could have much more influence than I ever gave them credit for (I assumed before that they had no real effect at the relatively macro scale of molecules and cells), and even perhaps being leveraged by the system in some way - in microtubules etc, adding yet another level of complexity and even perhaps connectivity. But even if quantum shit

I'd agree that the brain is both binary and analogue, in that the outputs of a neuron are spikes of variable frequency (the analogue part) but they only fire after a certain threshold value has been reached (the binary part). As a general rule I don't actually think about the brain in terms of brain waves. I should do perhaps but I don't, so I don't really know what it means by saying 'slow wave sleep' etc. But I'll assume that what you mean is that for a given population of neurons they could all be spiking at exactly the same time and at the same frequency resulting in perfectly synchronised pulses of maximum activity (or the reverse... no activity)? And the question being what effect would that have on the system? It's an interesting question... what would it take to 'break' the neural network?
I don't know but the first thing that comes to mind is that neurons work by exchanging ions with the extracellular fluid, and therefore maintaining different concentrations inside and outside the cell. Electronics is not my strong suit so perhaps you guys can help me understand this better


Anyway, the point of all that was to hopefully understand what could go wrong if a butterfly effect, snowball thingy happened


As for your question to both of us, about pulling neurons 1-by-1, I really don't know I'm sorry. I think a neural network will always find a way to represent whatever it can, depending on its connectivity, but with decreasing neurons and thus indirectly decreasing connectivity, the scope of the representations would reduce. But how to translate that into stable or variable I don't know... I think it would always be pretty stable whatever size it was but I don't really know what you mean.