Over aeons our brains scaled from several neurons to 100 billion neurons, each with 1000 synapses. They were able to do it because our brains are digital. They lean on their digital nature even more than computer chips do.
Action potentials are so digital it hurts. They aren't just quantized in level, but in the entire shape of the waveform across several milliseconds. Just as in computer chips, this suppresses perturbations. As long as higher level computation only depends on presence/absence of action potentials and timing, it inherits this robustness and allows scale. Rather than errors accumulating and preventing integration beyond a certain threshold, error resilience scales alongside computation. Every neuron "refreshes the signal," allowing arbitrary integration complexity at any scale, even in the face of messy biology problems along the way. Just like every transistor (or at least logic gate) "refreshes the signal" so that you can stack billions on a chip and quadrillions in sequential computation, even though each transistor is imperfect.
Digital computation is the way. Always has been, always will be.
Yes!
> Our brain has a pretty bounded need of scaling
No!
Over aeons our brains scaled from several neurons to 100 billion neurons, each with 1000 synapses. They were able to do it because our brains are digital. They lean on their digital nature even more than computer chips do.
Action potentials are so digital it hurts. They aren't just quantized in level, but in the entire shape of the waveform across several milliseconds. Just as in computer chips, this suppresses perturbations. As long as higher level computation only depends on presence/absence of action potentials and timing, it inherits this robustness and allows scale. Rather than errors accumulating and preventing integration beyond a certain threshold, error resilience scales alongside computation. Every neuron "refreshes the signal," allowing arbitrary integration complexity at any scale, even in the face of messy biology problems along the way. Just like every transistor (or at least logic gate) "refreshes the signal" so that you can stack billions on a chip and quadrillions in sequential computation, even though each transistor is imperfect.
Digital computation is the way. Always has been, always will be.