P1 sounds contra the evidences: when an action potential travels a myelinated axon, its precise amplitude does not matter (as long as it’s enough to make sodium channels open at the next Ranvier node). In other words, we could add or substrat a lot of ions at most of the 10^11 Ranvier nodes of the human brain without changing any information in mind.
However I didn’t get how you went from « tiny physical changes should correspond to tiny mental changes » (clearly wrong from above, unless tiny includes zero) to « non-infinitesimal mental change can have an infinitesimal (practically zero) effect on the physical world », so maybe I’m missing your point entirely. Could you rephrase or develop the latter?
Yeah, when I thought about it some more, maybe the smallest relevant physical change is a single neuron firing. Also with such a quantization, we cannot really talk about “infinitesimal” changes.
I still think that a single neuron firing, changing the content of experience so drastically, is quite hard to swallow. There is a sense in which all that mental content should “come from” somewhere.
I had a similar discussion with @benjamincosman, where I explore that in more detail. Here are my final thoughts from that discussion.
P1 sounds contra the evidences: when an action potential travels a myelinated axon, its precise amplitude does not matter (as long as it’s enough to make sodium channels open at the next Ranvier node). In other words, we could add or substrat a lot of ions at most of the 10^11 Ranvier nodes of the human brain without changing any information in mind.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltatory_conduction https://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/bionumber.aspx?s=n&v=5&id=100692 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Node_of_Ranvier
However I didn’t get how you went from « tiny physical changes should correspond to tiny mental changes » (clearly wrong from above, unless tiny includes zero) to « non-infinitesimal mental change can have an infinitesimal (practically zero) effect on the physical world », so maybe I’m missing your point entirely. Could you rephrase or develop the latter?
Yeah, when I thought about it some more, maybe the smallest relevant physical change is a single neuron firing. Also with such a quantization, we cannot really talk about “infinitesimal” changes.
I still think that a single neuron firing, changing the content of experience so drastically, is quite hard to swallow. There is a sense in which all that mental content should “come from” somewhere.
I had a similar discussion with @benjamincosman, where I explore that in more detail. Here are my final thoughts from that discussion.