Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think you correctly calculate bandwidth in this case. You assume 1 bit per neuron per tick, but time when it fires within the tick also matters, and that information is missing from multipliers. Also, there's no reason to use data from optical nerves as input, as it is already precompressed. You should be counting optical receptors instead (120 000 000).
I don’t think it matters that much. The firing itself takes a couple of milliseconds, and there’s a refactory period of a millisecond. I’m approximating 250hz as the maximum rate of firing. You’re arguing that the neuron can encode more information with the phase (e.g. fire, recover, wait 2ms, fire) but I think information theory tells us the 250hz actually still bounds the information. Maybe there’s a small constant…
But it matters little as even with 100x reduction the estimate blows GPT out of the water in the first year, making it very sample inefficient in comparison.
As for signal I am a layman in its most extreme here (only mist-like idea about information theory and frequency relationship), but don't the bandwidth limits only apply to fixed rate measurements? E.g. there's basically infinite (sans plank limits) number of values between 4ms and 5ms and as long as the receiver can separate them, they can encode information?
To put it in other words, if the neurons can control the impulse peak delay down to a nanosecond, then shouldn't the limit be measured based on 10^9Hz of that control vs 250Hz of max firing rate?