The Entire Universe Might Be a Neural Network | Hacker News Reader

The Entire Universe Might Be a Neural Network

futurism.com

12 pointsjonbaer10 comments

There is a Feuerbachian quality to the ideas in the category "What if the universe works like an X?" X gets substituted with the misunderstood but prized tech du jour. We've gone from the clockwork universe[1] of mechanical philosophy[2] to the computational universe[3] and now taking a tangent to the neural network universe. If history is a guide, you can bet that what ever sufficiently exalted and misunderstood technology appears there will be an associated theory of the universe attached to it. It says more about us than it does about the universe.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clockwork_universe

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_philosophy

[3] https://academic.oup.com/pq/article-abstract/53/211/243/1610...

It is possible to accept everything you say except for the last sentence.

Technology is the result of the evolutionary process of the universe. If the process resembles its own result, that shouldn't come as a surprise.

Not sure if we're in agreement then. Calling out the analogy as Feuerbachian is essentially saying that the analogies between technology and the universe are anthropological framed around our own ideals and not some universal truths.

Right. And in the second half of my comment I explained why your reasoning is faulty.

You must think the natural and artificial worlds as being self-similar. Think them as one continuous, self-organizing process.

Thank you for phrasing this so succinctly. Self-similarity pops up again and again in nature. Mostly we think of this in terms of geometry (fractals, etc...) but why couldn't self-similarity also apply to time oriented processes like cosmological evolution?

Bingo. Self-organization, in a strong sense, is the process of cosmological evolution.

The entire universe is always whatever the people looking at it know of but don't understand. It was a god, once, i.e. some guy. Then it was clockwork. Then it was a computer, then a quantum computer. Now, a neural network.

What will it be next week?

Probably the genetic (as in algorithm) universe.

How does the saying go? When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail?

If we ever make any progress on general AI then everything might actually be a nail... But we're so very far from that.

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