There is of course nothing to stop us from continuing this. Suppose we have a one-quarter brain? Much more probable. One millionth? Even more probable. Maybe even single elements of a nerve cell? More probable still.
If the question is whether our conscious experience might be attributable to a Boltzmann thingy, the lower bound on the size of the thingy is the amount of brain it takes to be conscious. I haven’t dissolved consciousness, of course, but I would be surprised if a single neuron could be conscious, no matter what state it was in.
Maybe a lifetime is an action potential. The “input” is provided because the precise configuration designating “existing” physically real sense impressions of a physically possible universe is necessary for such a configuration to even exist at all,- to the limits of the knowledge of that subjective being’s imagined experience. That limit makes it still statistically more probable than the entire history of a universe happening the exact way required to produce that moment.
If the question is whether our conscious experience might be attributable to a Boltzmann thingy, the lower bound on the size of the thingy is the amount of brain it takes to be conscious. I haven’t dissolved consciousness, of course, but I would be surprised if a single neuron could be conscious, no matter what state it was in.
Consciousness comes from many neurons working in unity, so one neuron could not create a consciousness.
Maybe a lifetime is an action potential. The “input” is provided because the precise configuration designating “existing” physically real sense impressions of a physically possible universe is necessary for such a configuration to even exist at all,- to the limits of the knowledge of that subjective being’s imagined experience. That limit makes it still statistically more probable than the entire history of a universe happening the exact way required to produce that moment.
If you can reproduce all the inputs, you can theoretically do it with a single neuron. Like a hologram of a higher dimensional object encoded onto a lower dimension. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3741678/