That anti-proportionality arguments seems tricky to me. It sounds comparable to the following example. You see a grey picture, composed of small black and white pixels. (The white pixles correspond to neuron firings in your example) The greyness depends on the proportion of white pixels. Now, what happens when you remove the black pixels? That is undefined. It could be that only white pixels are left and you now see 100% whiteness. Or the absent black pixels are still being seen as black, which means the same greyness as before. Or removing the black pixels correspond with making them transparent, and then who knows what you’ll see?
I would say my claim is that when you remove pixels, what you see in their place instead is in fact black, an absence of emitted light. There’s no functional difference at any moment between a missing pixel and a black pixel if we only distinguish them by how much light they emit, which, in this case, is none for both. I’d also expect this to be what happens with a real monitor/screen in the dark (although maybe there’s something non-black behind the pixels; we could assume the lights are transparent).
That anti-proportionality arguments seems tricky to me. It sounds comparable to the following example. You see a grey picture, composed of small black and white pixels. (The white pixles correspond to neuron firings in your example) The greyness depends on the proportion of white pixels. Now, what happens when you remove the black pixels? That is undefined. It could be that only white pixels are left and you now see 100% whiteness. Or the absent black pixels are still being seen as black, which means the same greyness as before. Or removing the black pixels correspond with making them transparent, and then who knows what you’ll see?
I would say my claim is that when you remove pixels, what you see in their place instead is in fact black, an absence of emitted light. There’s no functional difference at any moment between a missing pixel and a black pixel if we only distinguish them by how much light they emit, which, in this case, is none for both. I’d also expect this to be what happens with a real monitor/screen in the dark (although maybe there’s something non-black behind the pixels; we could assume the lights are transparent).