Seeing red

[bennyboy]

What I don't know, relative to the question, is whether or not this is what you mean by stable and variable.  Presumably, if you've removed all of the neurons of the motor cortex the system itself (ignoring the "full body" system) is going to be pretty stable (even though you can't move).  If there's some amount of them left trying to coordinate with nobody, as it were, you can imagine a situation in which jerky and unpredicatble motion is both expressed by the subject and reflected in constant "errors" in the cortex.  You'll see this with the condition I linked back there with the nazis..due to iron buildup in the brain which causes neurons to malfunction leading to parkinsons like symptoms that get progressively worse.  You might consider this chemical removal of nuerons leading to instability in both the system and in loss of function (or control of function) on the whole.

Read my response to Emjay.

I'd say that if the brain represents a chaotic system whose job is to perform digital functions, then as you pulled neurons you'd lose "resolution," leading at some point to so much noise in the system that the digital functions could no longer be reliably performed, resulting in some total system failure at a critical mass.

If the brain cannot be represented by logic gates, however, then I'd expect a gradual decrease in function from Einstein down to earthworm-- like a dimmer switch rather than an on/off switch, as chaos should be (at least it seems to me in this moment of pure speculation) fractal.

This is important for your model of ideas, because the digital function of the brain might reasonably be simulated by any physical structure (say a computer), but a chaotic or analog function might not be reproducible in any manner without an actual brain. Alternately, ANY sufficiently chaotic AI system might be intrinsically conscious, if it is in fact that chaos in which the ghost in the gears resides.