Posted on 09/11/2020 12:08:16 PM PDT by Kalija
Futurism: Your paper argues that the universe might fundamentally be a neural network. How would you explain your reasoning to someone who didn’t know very much about neural networks or physics?
Vitaly Vanchurin: There are two ways to answer your question.
The first way is to start with a precise model of neural networks and then to study the behavior of the network in the limit of a large number of neurons. What I have shown is that equations of quantum mechanics describe pretty well the behavior of the system near equilibrium and equations of classical mechanics describes pretty well how the system further away from the equilibrium. Coincidence? May be, but as far as we know quantum and classical mechanics is exactly how the physical world works.
The second way is to start from physics. We know that quantum mechanics works pretty well on small scales and general relativity works pretty well on large scales, but so far we were not able to reconcile the two theories in a unified framework. This is known as the problem of quantum gravity. Clearly, we are missing something big, but to make matters worse we do not even know how to handle observers. This is known as the measurement problem in context of quantum mechanics and the measure problem in context of cosmology.
Then one might argue that there are not two, but three phenomena that need to be unified: quantum mechanics, general relativity and observers. 99% of physicists would tell you that quantum mechanics is the main one and everything else should somehow emerge from it, but nobody knows exactly how that can be done. In this paper I consider another possibility that a microscopic neural network is the fundamental structure and everything else, i.e. quantum mechanics, general relativity and macroscopic observers, emerges from it. So far things look rather promising.
We used to study systems in school. digestive system, circulatory system, nerve system, carbon cycle, water cycle, nitrogen cycle.
Systems are amazing things and then systems interact with other systems. Can never get our arms around a system to fully understand it.
So then we grab one small itty bitty part of a system and think we think we are in control as long as we ignore the rest of the system.
BOOM.
mind blowing... God’s perception is our reality.
t shirts available soon.
Intelligence fills and builds everything in the universe. Every cell of our bodies contains intelligence specific to its tasks.
What God imagines manifests instantly, and the universe is being imagined at all times.
consider another possibility that a microscopic neural network is the fundamental structure and everything else, i.e. quantum mechanics, general relativity and macroscopic observers, emerges from it.
LOL...Perhaps the Good Lord is merely catching a few winks and is having a nightmare—Human Life on Earth.
When I wake up all y’all are gonna disappear.
And I will turn to my red hot 21 YO wife and say “you will NOT believe the dream I had.” And her left head will wake up and say “go back to sleep.” Then the third one will say “all 5 of you shut up!”
Choose wisely...
But wait! some other “scientist” says it’s a simulation. So what is it? a big mass of dark matter imploding into a black hole expelling dark energy into wormholes warping spacetime into a singularity?
The appropriate response to this BS.
Everything that exists is in the mind of God.
Such things are unfathomable to us and very mysterious and wonderful.
Funny movie.
Exodus 3:14, John 8:58. Jesus the “I AM “, Lord of all creation.
“I am” the most profound statement ever made in my opinion.
I agree. I love that Jesus, God Incarnate, says that in the garden when they come to take him and they fall backwards.
Creator declaring to His created beings. Created beings react at the subconscious level.
My problem with this theory based on universal neural net is that it doesn’t seem to be possible based on any neural net system I’m familiar with. A neural net “learns” by adjusting its firing weights to minimize some internal cost function which must be trained a priori against known outcomes.
Since the Universe is “everything” there is no possible “training” data that could be learned that would produce the truly random amplitude measurements seen in quantum mechanical experiments for example. The Schrodinger wave equation is a much more concise and parsimonious way to model this phenomenon.
I agree the Universe evolved from the Big Bang but this is better explained by the concept of symmetry breaking as spacetime expanded and energy diluted rather than some learning algorithm based on invisible “neuron” networks.
I think one needs to be on drugs to make sense of this.
“Modern physicist: It’s possible that the universe is a two-dimensional bubble wrapped in a six-dimensional blanket. I have no real evidence to support that. In fact, I just made the whole thing up yesterday.”
That’s not near true. It’s crazy BS. Why assert it?
> It’s crazy BS. Why assert it? <
My unnamed “modern physicist” quote was satire, a gross exaggeration for comic effect. (Maybe I got the exaggeration part right, but missed the comic effect part this time - win some, lose some.)
Anyway, I’ve taught both Relativity and Quantum Mechanics at the college level. I understand the article, and I understand how those theoretical physicists often think. They often go off on crazy tangents that are nothing more thinking out loud. Hence the satire.
Here’s another example. There is no hard lab evidence for string theory. None. And it is thought by many that there will never be any such evidence! Yet many theoretical physicists spend a lifetime fussing around with it.
That’s not what satire is.
String theory, while unproven, is not crazy BS.
Darwin said he could not imagine creation by chance. Instead he believed in a ‘first cause’ from an intelligent mind much like humans.
Not an exact quote but close. It’s in his first issue autobiography
BeGood/StayStrong
> String theory, while unproven, is not crazy BS. <
My point was that string theory (and the ideas in this article) have no hard evidence to back them up. I would not call string theory “crazy BS” because there is some math to behind it. But without that experimental evidence, I don’t think string theory deserving of all that much respect. Just my opinion.
Now here’s the thing. Both Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are odd, very odd. But both have been completely verified in the lab. Einstein himself proposed some experiments to test Relativity. And, of, course, his theories passed those tests.
But there seems to be no way to test the ideas in this article - or to test string theory. Hence the gentle satire (or ribbing, if you wish).
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