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Comment by clarle | Hacker News Reader

Totally aware that this isn't a fully formal definition of deep learning, but one interesting takeaway for me is realizing that in a way, corporations with their formal and informal reporting structures are structured in a way similar to neural networks too.

It seems like these sort of structures just regularly arise to help regulate the flow of information through a system.

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There is research claiming the entire universe is a neural network: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7712105/

You can find theoretical physics research claiming a lot of bonkers things that almost certainly are not true, that's sort of the nature of the field.

That's the sort of blue sky research I'm glad exists.

Indra's Net is, in fact, a neural network

Frankly, stuff like this makes me more skeptical of the ML community. Remember when people thought Brains were just really complicated hydraulic systems?

Vanchurin is a physics professor, but ok https://twitter.com/vanchurin?lang=en

I actually think that interdisciplinary work like this can shed light into common structures across physics, biology, neuroscience, CS, etc. If anything, I wish there were more attempts to explore the connections between these disciplines.

The author is basically a crank, it looks like they held some teaching positions in an unrelated subject at various universities yielding the “professor” title, and originally studied/published actual research in cosmology decades back.

Might as well be skeptical of the math community because of circle squarers

> The author is basically a crank

Really not sure why do you say this. Is it something personal against him? Are you against people exploring weird interdisciplinary topics?

He has tons of publications [1], including co-authorship with people like this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Koonin

Koonin is certainly not a crank, and is a rather well-known interdisciplinary researcher at the intersection of biology and physics.

[1] https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=nEEFLp0AAAAJ...

Uh,

The similarity of corporations and neural nets is pretty much only that both are information processing systems. An operating system or missile guidance system is far more like a corporation than a neural network.

Neural networks have no memory and generally don't seek particular goals, they simply recognize, predict and generate similar instances.

Plenty of ways to think about this stuff. IMO neural networks don’t inherently do anything, it’s just a data structure.

Different ways you can interact with that data structure can however provide meaning and store information in the weights etc.

    > Neural networks have no memory and generally don't seek particular goals, they simply recognize, predict and generate similar instances.

Sounds exactly like every corporation I've ever worked in.

Neural networks do have a memory of sorts, that’s why they improve with node size. A mathematician proved something along these lines recently.

The memory isn’t digital bits like we think of now though, but abstractions in higher dimensions.

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