I agree.
‘Stochastic’ generally means ‘random’. I’d rather say that the signals are probably diverse in timing and strength, and may be diverse in origin (by brachiation and cross-connections, spread of molecules in the intercellular environment, etc.). Upon afferent signals arriving at a synapse they nevertheless result in one efferent signal. This is a stochastic process by which diverse effects resolve to a single result. The phrase ‘stochastic process’ of course does not assert that the process is random, only that the inputs may be characterized by a probability distribution. Conceptually, it is analogous to a funnel with a set of variables with probably different values pouring in and a single variable flowing out.
Collective control is a process by which diverse effects resolve to a single result, whether the participating autonomous control systems are cells or humans or any of a variety of other creatures. Such is the scope of PCT.
In B:CP Bill said
…“As the basic measure of nervous system activity, therefore, I choose to use neural current, defined as the number of impulses passing through a cross section of all parallel redundant fibers in a given bundle per unit time”….
In practice, to measure ‘a’ neural current is to get a sample, a mean, or an average. ‘Neural bundle’, ‘parallel’, and ‘neural current’ are theoretical abstractions. We resort to them for good reason, because we could not proceed otherwise.
To base a theory with measurable consequences on the entire neural connection network, with its trillions of synaptic connections in the brain alone, would be totally unwieldy and humanly impossible to comprehend. Even just the timings underlying nerve firings, let alone synaptic variation of firing likelihoods, are also too much for an analytic human theorist to encompass usefully.*PPC* I.1.3 "Neural Bundles and Neural Current"
Accordingly, as a theorist, Powers resorted to statistical measures in order to develop an intelligible theory.
One of these measures was the ‘neural current’, underlying which was another, the loosely defined ‘neural bundle’.