We don't know that in any way that is relevant. A biological neuron is complex and made of lots of elements where very fine interactions can plausibly have effe

We don't know that in any way that is relevant. A biological neuron is complex and made of lots of elements where very fine interactions can plausibly have effect, so in a sense, there is a combinatorially infinite space of neuron-states, but there's no evidence its upper-level computational function that leads to learning and producing adaptive outputs in response to inputs is not discrete. Indeed it seems that most of the complexity [that isn't just "piping" for life functions – don't forget these things aren't semiconductors in metallic sheets fabricated by TSMC, they have to migrate to their sites and branch out on their own, they consume, they excrete, they function for many decades!] is redundant and serves to compensate for various biological shortcomings like low transmission speed, limited bandwidth, noise and stochasticity, developmental abnormalities, cell death etc. Analog computers also don't have infinite states, because of the noise floor. A synapse can encode at most some low tens of states[1], synapses are discrete, spiking is discrete, receptor density is discrete, each neurotransmitter release is made up of discrete number of vesicles with a discrete number of molecules, even epigenetic expression is discrete. That it's not all perfectly algorithmically executed is not key to the function being performed – and anyway, at the limits of high-performance compute we also start to deal with esoteric processes, and ways of suppressing them. We didn't design the brain nor do we have perfect ways of observing it in vivo, so we can't always neatly distinguish the wheat and the chaff; but this cannot be seriously taken as a cause to think it's all wheat. Non-human animals show that it's not magic either; even apes, with brains architecturally almost (not wholly) identical to ours but smaller, cannot learn any of the hard symbol-manipulating stuff that we or later GPTs can and that we colloquially refer to as intelligent behavior and reward economically. This, I think, is a very strong prior for that sort of intelligence not being dependent on some low-level expressivity of biological neural computational substrate. Penrose-Hamerroff's "quantum effects in microtubules" thesis is crank science not supported by any direct evidence. 1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5247597/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5247597/