I have one thing to add that may not be fully appreciated elsewhere, but is clearly true.
When an action potential rushes through an axon to a synapse, which fine details does the law of physics even allow to interfere? Some of these endless arguments about how complex a neuron can be remind me of the audio reproduction arguments. Succinctly, the information you see at the end of a cable—any cable, including one in a brain—is a pulse made of subcomponents of sine waves, with the highest frequency wave proportional to the bandwidth. Square peaks are always rounded off.
What this means is that any factor that doesn’t affect the timing of the synapse enough for the firing of the next synapse to be affected has zero net effect.
Similar arguments apply to the effects of signal to noise for learning and other long term adjustments for a synapse.
What this means is a digital equivalent need only duplicate the signal part. It may turn out that 1 bit of resolution is more than enough.
I have one thing to add that may not be fully appreciated elsewhere, but is clearly true.
When an action potential rushes through an axon to a synapse, which fine details does the law of physics even allow to interfere? Some of these endless arguments about how complex a neuron can be remind me of the audio reproduction arguments. Succinctly, the information you see at the end of a cable—any cable, including one in a brain—is a pulse made of subcomponents of sine waves, with the highest frequency wave proportional to the bandwidth. Square peaks are always rounded off.
What this means is that any factor that doesn’t affect the timing of the synapse enough for the firing of the next synapse to be affected has zero net effect.
Similar arguments apply to the effects of signal to noise for learning and other long term adjustments for a synapse.
What this means is a digital equivalent need only duplicate the signal part. It may turn out that 1 bit of resolution is more than enough.