what’s the factorial of (# of neurons in the human brain)?
You have on the order of 10^11 neurons. We can use Stirling’s formula which is a good, quick, approximation for n! to get around 10^(11*10^11 − 4*10^10 + 6)
Note that there’s growing evidence that glial cells play a role in neural interaction. Thus, a total for all neorons is not necessarily an upper bound. However, at the same time, it seems that electric field interactions aren’t that important (humans react pretty normally when in the presence of strong electromagnetic fields unless they are of specific types. So the interaction can’t be that sensitive). Moreover, we know that killing a few neurons doesn’t drastically alter personality, which is a strong argument for not having such complicated interactions.
Not a strong argument—it is known that the brain has a fair bit of redundancy, as demonstrated by the ways parts of damaged brain can be trained to perform tasks the corresponding parts do not handle in healthy brains.
You have on the order of 10^11 neurons. We can use Stirling’s formula which is a good, quick, approximation for n! to get around 10^(11*10^11 − 4*10^10 + 6)
Note that there’s growing evidence that glial cells play a role in neural interaction. Thus, a total for all neorons is not necessarily an upper bound. However, at the same time, it seems that electric field interactions aren’t that important (humans react pretty normally when in the presence of strong electromagnetic fields unless they are of specific types. So the interaction can’t be that sensitive). Moreover, we know that killing a few neurons doesn’t drastically alter personality, which is a strong argument for not having such complicated interactions.
Not a strong argument—it is known that the brain has a fair bit of redundancy, as demonstrated by the ways parts of damaged brain can be trained to perform tasks the corresponding parts do not handle in healthy brains.