Is the Universe a neural network? Mind of God?

[mikkel_the_dane]

Where does this stuff come from?

What stuff?

 

[Fool]

The scientific part can easily be tested according to the authors. And maybe it will be proven wrong. But if it's proven correct, then, of course, the speculation that the universe is a neural network could be a theist's dream come true. Because of course the universal neural network could theoretically be called an instantiation of the mind of God.

The article is pure science: New research indicates the whole universe could be a giant neural network

In this paper we discussed a possibility that the entire universe on its most fundamental level is a neural network. This is a very bold claim. We are not just saying that the artificial neural networks can be useful for analyzing physical systems or for discovering physical laws, we are saying that this is how the world around us actually works. With this respect it could be considered as a proposal for the theory of everything, and as such it should be easy to prove it wrong. All that is needed is to find a physical phenomenon which cannot be described by neural networks.

And as the electrical vibrations are given, know that Life itself - to be sure - is the Creative Force or God, yet its manifestations in man are electrical - or vibratory. Know then that the force in nature that is called electrical or electricity is that same force ye worship as Creative or God in action! Seeing this, feeling this, knowing this, ye will find that not only does the body become revivified, but by the creating in every atom of its being the knowledge of the activity of this Creative Force or Principle as related to spirit, mind, body - all three are renewed. #EdgarCayce reading 1299-1

 

[Twilight Hue]

What stuff?

The religious mumbo jumbo.

 

[Fool]

If God is material, his existence would be contingent on the material. How could he be the creator of the material universe then?

god is material in the sense that god is not nothing, it is no thing before form. just as energy can transform but not lost

 

[Fool]

The religious mumbo jumbo.

it would be the biggest joke ever played upon the materialist.


being a product of your own mind

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

The religious mumbo jumbo.

Natural, physical human brains. Religion is a natural human behavior.
If you believe that the universe is natural and physical.

 

[ChristineM]

This might explain why when we average the guesses of large numbers of people as to any particular thing we often get this being so much better than most individuals - but then there is probably a good explanation for this too.

Wisdom of the crowd - Wikipedia

The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it. - Terry Pratchett

 

[ChristineM]

The scientific part can easily be tested according to the authors. And maybe it will be proven wrong. But if it's proven correct, then, of course, the speculation that the universe is a neural network could be a theist's dream come true. Because of course the universal neural network could theoretically be called an instantiation of the mind of God.

The article is pure science: New research indicates the whole universe could be a giant neural network

In this paper we discussed a possibility that the entire universe on its most fundamental level is a neural network. This is a very bold claim. We are not just saying that the artificial neural networks can be useful for analyzing physical systems or for discovering physical laws, we are saying that this is how the world around us actually works. With this respect it could be considered as a proposal for the theory of everything, and as such it should be easy to prove it wrong. All that is needed is to find a physical phenomenon which cannot be described by neural networks.

I think this idea comes from the likeness between a natural neural net (the brain) and galactic filaments.

Artists impression of the galactic web


The human brain

Difference being scale, in the brain the neurons are close together (around 86 billion in one human brain) and are physically connected with axons and dendrites. Information travels at around 30 mph between them. Something the size of a (say) human neural net the neurones can react almost, but not quite instantly.

In galactic filaments the galaxies are not connected, separated by thousands of light years. With information travelling at the speed of light it could take around 25000+ years for information to move from one galaxy to the next.

This is why i don't believe the universe forms a neural net.

 

[sun rise]

Evidently this paper has yet to pass peer review.

My suspicion is that it never will.

Good point. It's something to keep an eye on.

 

[Ostronomos]

FINALLY! A THREAD THAT RESONATES WITH THE EVIDENCE LAID OUT IN QUANTUM SCIENCE!!!!!

 

[sealchan]

The scientific part can easily be tested according to the authors. And maybe it will be proven wrong. But if it's proven correct, then, of course, the speculation that the universe is a neural network could be a theist's dream come true. Because of course the universal neural network could theoretically be called an instantiation of the mind of God.

The article is pure science: New research indicates the whole universe could be a giant neural network

In this paper we discussed a possibility that the entire universe on its most fundamental level is a neural network. This is a very bold claim. We are not just saying that the artificial neural networks can be useful for analyzing physical systems or for discovering physical laws, we are saying that this is how the world around us actually works. With this respect it could be considered as a proposal for the theory of everything, and as such it should be easy to prove it wrong. All that is needed is to find a physical phenomenon which cannot be described by neural networks.

I assume that this article is being literal...and that it is making the assumption that our knowledge of the Universe and the social collective of neural networks which we human beings use can somehow be separated from that knowledge.

Of course the Universe is a neural network...human beings can no more understand anything without their "brain-colored" glasses than we can swim without a fluid medium to swim in.

Maybe the question could be rephrased as "is there any physics that our brains cannot understand?"

 

[sealchan]

The scientific part can easily be tested according to the authors. And maybe it will be proven wrong. But if it's proven correct, then, of course, the speculation that the universe is a neural network could be a theist's dream come true. Because of course the universal neural network could theoretically be called an instantiation of the mind of God.

The article is pure science: New research indicates the whole universe could be a giant neural network

In this paper we discussed a possibility that the entire universe on its most fundamental level is a neural network. This is a very bold claim. We are not just saying that the artificial neural networks can be useful for analyzing physical systems or for discovering physical laws, we are saying that this is how the world around us actually works. With this respect it could be considered as a proposal for the theory of everything, and as such it should be easy to prove it wrong. All that is needed is to find a physical phenomenon which cannot be described by neural networks.

Another angle on this is that the Universe AND our various neural networks have much in common and can be similarly described as complex, adaptive systems.

Recognizing that the Universe, as a whole, might be a complex, adaptive system brings with some consequences...most importantly is that the idea that we cannot know the Universe as that which is all there was, is or will ever be is naive (sorry Mr. Sagan). What should be expected is that the Universe has "loose strings" in that there will be phenomena that we will likely only be able to partially observe because as ourselves being embedded within that Universal system, we have limitations with respect to being able to observe the Universe (i.e. ourselves).

This is what I call the problem of self-reference which can be summed in the phrase "the eye cannot see itself seeing". So all the weirdness of the quantum stuff starts to sound more expected once this is realized.

 

[Aupmanyav]

As long at you know that thinking doesn't make it so as for independent of thinking, you can think all you like. So can we all including me.

Sure, we do not have the final answer and a lot of search will have to be made before we can make sense of it. I would not have the answer in my life-time (78). It is for next-gen.

 

[blü 2]

The scientific part can easily be tested according to the authors. And maybe it will be proven wrong. But if it's proven correct, then, of course, the speculation that the universe is a neural network could be a theist's dream come true. Because of course the universal neural network could theoretically be called an instantiation of the mind of God.

The article is pure science: New research indicates the whole universe could be a giant neural network

In this paper we discussed a possibility that the entire universe on its most fundamental level is a neural network. This is a very bold claim. We are not just saying that the artificial neural networks can be useful for analyzing physical systems or for discovering physical laws, we are saying that this is how the world around us actually works. With this respect it could be considered as a proposal for the theory of everything, and as such it should be easy to prove it wrong. All that is needed is to find a physical phenomenon which cannot be described by neural networks.

A neural network is a network ─ an interconnected system ─ of neurons, biological or mechanical.

Having read that brief report, I have no idea what kind of neuron or "neuron" is intended ─ I have a dark suspicion that it's a metaphor for something not precisely defined, but I don't mind being wrong ─ nor what indeed is proposed overall.

I wonder if the staffer who wrote the report knows more than I do. I didn't see much indication of it.

 

[Clara Tea]

The scientific part can easily be tested according to the authors. And maybe it will be proven wrong. But if it's proven correct, then, of course, the speculation that the universe is a neural network could be a theist's dream come true. Because of course the universal neural network could theoretically be called an instantiation of the mind of God.

The article is pure science: New research indicates the whole universe could be a giant neural network

In this paper we discussed a possibility that the entire universe on its most fundamental level is a neural network. This is a very bold claim. We are not just saying that the artificial neural networks can be useful for analyzing physical systems or for discovering physical laws, we are saying that this is how the world around us actually works. With this respect it could be considered as a proposal for the theory of everything, and as such it should be easy to prove it wrong. All that is needed is to find a physical phenomenon which cannot be described by neural networks.

The universe is composed of long strings of matter. In their current position, no force could have moved them where they are.

We shouldn't jump to conclusions, and note that energy transfer between the stings might somehow indicate life or thought. There are plenty of things that we are certain about, and there is no need to imagine solutions to the unknown.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

Evidently this paper has yet to pass peer review.

My suspicion is that it never will.

It did, unfortunately:
Vanchurin, V. (2020). The world as a neural network. Entropy, 22(11), 1210.
Not that this means much, given the number of peer-reviewed journals that have emerged with their main goal being to publish articles that wouldn't pass review elsewhere. There's nothing that spectacularly problematic or comparatively pseudoscientific in the paper, however, at least compared to a fair amount of literature in theoretical physics and cosmology ( e.g., does anybody really believe that "drainons" are identifiable physical fields that "drain" the string "swampland" as recent "progress" in string theory proposes?). The author just takes a lot of basic equations from various branches of physics, places them in a different conceptual context in which he identifies ways in which they are similar to a somewhat atypical characterization of a class of formal ANNs, makes much more than he should out of the ways in which the dimensionality of spaces and the dynamics of learning models that explore these change in ways that are (not unsuprisingly) similar to ways we find structures in microscopic and macroscopic scales (as well as exploiting links between thermodynamics and learning, which predate ANNs as they go back to Shannon and should constitute double-dipping here), and then does a lot of hand-waving combined with unclear but highly suggestive terminology.
Essentially, we have an unwarranted comparison between in particular hidden ANN layers and an interpretation of QM (in particular, "hidden variables" or Bohmian-type mechanics) alongside a reinterpretation of "learning" that is practically indistinguishable from "evolving in time" as any system would. That the behavior of interacting systems modelled via similar formalisms in the same or equivalent spaces "explore" these spaces and change states (and more) in some ways that are similar is not at all surprising. One could write a paper showing just as easily (or more so) that the universe is a bunch of complex, interacting pendulums or mattress springs (indeed, the analogy between mattress springs and condensed matter physics as well as quantum field theory more generally has already been made many times!).
At the end of the day, the neural network(s) in the paper don't perform in any manner that warrants the name. State vectors are a key components of many approaches and algorithm classes in machine learning that aren't neural networks. ANNs are classified not so much by their ability to "learn" but due to the fact that they are based upon a specific biological model that is almost completely ignored in the paper. Thus it isn't so much that there is anything wrong in the paper as it is that there isn't anything meaningful said in the guts of the work, just a lot of terminology misuse and suggestive wording with carefully (mis)selected contexts.

 

[exchemist]

It did, unfortunately:
Vanchurin, V. (2020). The world as a neural network. Entropy, 22(11), 1210.
Not that this means much, given the number of peer-reviewed journals that have emerged with their main goal being to publish articles that wouldn't pass review elsewhere. There's nothing that spectacularly problematic or comparatively pseudoscientific in the paper, however, at least compared to a fair amount of literature in theoretical physics and cosmology ( e.g., does anybody really believe that "drainons" are identifiable physical fields that "drain" the string "swampland" as recent "progress" in string theory proposes?). The author just takes a lot of basic equations from various branches of physics, places them in a different conceptual context in which he identifies ways in which they are similar to a somewhat atypical characterization of a class of formal ANNs, makes much more than he should out of the ways in which the dimensionality of spaces and the dynamics of learning models that explore these change in ways that are (not unsuprisingly) similar to ways we find structures in microscopic and macroscopic scales (as well as exploiting links between thermodynamics and learning, which predate ANNs as they go back to Shannon and should constitute double-dipping here), and then does a lot of hand-waving combined with unclear but highly suggestive terminology.
Essentially, we have an unwarranted comparison between in particular hidden ANN layers and an interpretation of QM (in particular, "hidden variables" or Bohmian-type mechanics) alongside a reinterpretation of "learning" that is practically indistinguishable from "evolving in time" as any system would. That the behavior of interacting systems modelled via similar formalisms in the same or equivalent spaces "explore" these spaces and change states (and more) in some ways that are similar is not at all surprising. One could write a paper showing just as easily (or more so) that the universe is a bunch of complex, interacting pendulums or mattress springs (indeed, the analogy between mattress springs and condensed matter physics as well as quantum field theory more generally has already been made many times!).
At the end of the day, the neural network(s) in the paper don't perform in any manner that warrants the name. State vectors are a key components of many approaches and algorithm classes in machine learning that aren't neural networks. ANNs are classified not so much by their ability to "learn" but due to the fact that they are based upon a specific biological model that is almost completely ignored in the paper. Thus it isn't so much that there is anything wrong in the paper as it is that there isn't anything meaningful said in the guts of the work, just a lot of terminology misuse and suggestive wording with carefully (mis)selected contexts.

Thanks, very informative. So I was wrong about it not betting published - but right about the industrial strength hand-waving.

I rather like the notion of the universe being made up - at a fundamental level - of mattress springs. The shade of Douglas Adams would appreciate that greatly. @Ostronomos, probably less so...........