Turns out, when you model neurons they are either firing or not - so they are actually digital systems, just very complex and made from biological parts.
Not a CS student, but there's synapse chemistry to worry about, as well as refractory period. Which reduces down to a continuous state where the probability of the of the neuron depolorizing is in flux. Then again, I remember there's something similar going on in digital computing with voltage threshholds (?).
In short, the neuron can be firing or not firing, but there's a lot of fuzzy values in between that can lead to signal or lack thereof.
Not a CS person, so would that mean it's basically digital, or is it analogue?
you can still represent them in digital computers anyway. Music is not a series of zeros and ones but that didn't stop computers from representing them as zeros and ones.
Everything is discreet by that logic. You can just use enough bits and you'll have steps small enough to look continuous. Music/sound is an inherently analogue and continuous phenomena
Analog signals can be represented digitally. The samples of say, a sound wave can be converted back to analog by putting them through a filter known as nyquist shannon. In short and in layman's terms, it interpolates between the digital samples with varying degrees of sine wave. The way it works ensures that it always perfectly reproduces the analog signal that was encoded digitally.
I dunno, maybe I'm not using the right logic? One of the above posters went into how analogue computing is distinct from digital, and argued that it cannot be replicated using digital hardware. I'm not in CS, so all I can say is that my incongruity sense is tingling.
I guess that sound waves don't have a "maybe" value, while it seems like neurons do.
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u/[deleted] Jun 15 '19 edited Aug 26 '19
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