Is the Universe a neural network?

Got around to writing a post on this:

One of the great things about science and philosophy today is that it seems the world is wide open. Richard Feynman made many colorful observations and this one seems particularly appropriate as we examine the landscape of ever more weird ideas:

“Today we cannot see whether Schrödinger’s equation contains frogs, musical composers, or morality. We cannot say whether something beyond it like God is needed, or not. And we can all hold strong opinions either way.”

Let’s take a quick inventory of currently contemplated explanations of reality:
The multiverse with new universes created multiple billions of times per second or nanosecond
String theory with 10-26 hidden, undiscoverable extra dimensions
The fifth dimension
The unreality of space and time
Non-locality where one part of the universe operates in complete synchronization with another part regardless of distance
Dark matter where the majority of our material world is not, at least nothing material we know anything about
Dark energy where the majority of our energy is…
Quantum measurement where a conscious mind has an effect on matter
Pansychism where consciousness pervades the universe at the level of every particle

Of course, this doesn’t even scratch the surface. But, now let’s add one more wild and crazy idea from a physicist: the entire universe is really just one big neural network. This idea, published in Futurism on September 9 attempts to explain the idea of University of Minnesota Duluth physicist Vitaly Vanchurin. Vanchurin is quoted as saying:

“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,” reads the paper’s discussion. “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.”

Being about the farthest thing from a physicist I am in no position to try to validate or invalidate this idea. I just want to try and understand it a bit––and enjoy it.

A neural network, according to wikipedia,

“…is a network or circuit of neurons, or in a modern sense, an artificial neural network, composed of artificial neurons or nodes. Thus a neural network is either a biological neural network, made up of real biological neurons, or an artificial neural network, for solving artificial intelligence problems.”

Ok, in my way of thinking, it is a brain, or a processing unit, or perhaps a network of processing units working together. It can be biological or artificial. If Vanchurin is right, they might have to add one more category: everything.

Computer processing systems including our brains take in information, process it in some way, and produce outputs that make some difference in our world. I’m sure that’s not a complete definition, but it seems to incorporate much of what our brains and those made of silicon and other stuff which are intended to replicate brain functions.

If the entire universe is one neural network, what information does it receive? How and why does it process it? And what difference does it make? It seems Vanchurin would have to have some answers for those. I’m not sure what good a neural network might be if it doesn’t do at least something like that.

What intrigued me about this idea is the connection, perhaps distant, to the increasingly popular idea of pansychism. When the arguably leading philosopher of the mind (David Chalmers), and the arguably leading neuroscientist studying consciousness (Christof Koch), and the arguably leading physicist dealing with consciousness (Roger Penrose), all come to the conclusion that consciousness is an inherent property of our physical world and pervades every element of it, it seems we may want to sit up and take notice.

But, a neural network is not conscious. At least so far it has eluded every effort to show that it actually is consciousness and/or that it produces consciousness. Despite some contrary claims, Chalmers does a pretty good job of showing that the correlation of neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) do not produce consciousness. There is a difference between relating to consciousness and explaining it, as he makes clear. When Koch claims that Integrated Information Theory (IIT) shows that the integrated network does not just produce consciousness but actually is consciousness, it seems apparent he goes beyond what the theory can provide.

So Vanchurin’s idea of the universe as one vast neural network doesn’t appear to support or be linked in any substantial way to pansychism.

This idea also resonated for me with an intriguing book by Oxford educated Canadian philosopher John Leslie and his 2007 book Immortality Defended. In it he suggests that all of reality exists in the Mind of God. This is a Spinoza-like form of pantheism. If mind is a neural network, or is produced by a neural network, or if it is indistinguishable from a neural network and all matter and everything that is consists of one vast neural network I’m not sure how that is much different from what Leslie and even Spinoza were suggesting. Of course, for scientists today, it is fine to talk about neural networks in terms of mind/brain functions, but bring in the word “God” and there is either a very uncomfortable silence or the sound or razzberries. Vanchurin would most likely run as fast as he could from such suggestions.

Back to physics, Vanchurin explains that his idea of the universe may solve three main issues bedeviling this discipline:
“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.”
There is a hint in this of a correspondence between the neural network and consciousness. It seems if the neural network that is the entire universe is indeed an intelligence processing information and that, as physicalists believe, that therefore it must be conscious, that may shed some light on the measurement problem. Afterall, if the universe itself is conscious, the collapse of the wave function and the consequence of altering physical reality to enter a classical state that we experience could be quite easily imagined.
It will, of course, be up to the physicists to see if this is a promising start, as Vanchurin believes. Or if it is yet another in an endless series of speculations about the real nature of things––speculations that seem to get farther removed from our everyday experiences and our intuition of what is real all the time.
And that is the real meaning of Vanchurin’s thought. We live in what one might call a “green cheese” universe. As children we were told that the moon was made of green cheese. For all we knew it was true. For all we knew. For the vast majority of the history of curious humans peering at that strange light in the sky, there was no one who could tell them that it wasn’t green cheese, or some god chasing some goddess across the night sky. Now we know better. We know such much more. And yet, the more we know, it seems the less we really know. The mysteries compound.
Origins, life, why is there something rather than nothing, did it all tumble into place in some remarkable and unimaginable sequence of the wildest coincidences? While physicalism reduces all answers to the matter and physical laws, it seems increasingly threatened by what the search for the physicalist answers are revealing. Consciousness is only one such example. The very nature of matter remains a deepening mystery, and that was without this confounded thing called dark matter.
So we live in a time when speculations abound. With those mysteries, sometimes it appears that the world is regaining some of the enchantment it held when people knew they didn’t know what went bump in the night. Now, for too long we have pretended we do know. No, we don’t. Richard Feynman was right––again. Does Schrodinger’s equation contain frogs, musical instruments? Or, is it all made of green cheese?