Our Universe Is A Giant Neural Network That Governs Everything Around Us – Physicist Says

Cynthia McKanzie – MessageToEagle.com – A controversial theory put forward by a physicist questions all our beliefs about the universe and nature of reality. According to his intriguing theory, it’s very possible we’re living inside a massive neural network that governs everything around us.

Basically, physics Professor Vitaly Vanchurin from the University of Minnesota Duluth proposes our Universe is an interconnected computational system similar in structure to the human brain.

“It’s a possibility that the entire universe on its most fundamental level is a neural network,” he writes in his science paper.

Professor Vanchurin thinks his theory could reconcile classical physics and quantum mechanics, which has a long-standing problem in physics.

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In his paper, Vanchurin argues that artificial neural networks can “exhibit approximate behaviors” of both universal theories. Since quantum mechanics “is a remarkably successful paradigm for modeling physical phenomena on a wide range of scales,” he writes, “it is widely believed that on the most fundamental level the entire universe is governed by the rules of quantum mechanics and even gravity should somehow emerge from it.”

“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,’ Professor Vanchurin wrote in his paper.

Professor Vanchurin knows this is a very bold claim.

“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. Unfortunately, [this] is easier said than done.’”

Instead of trying to reconcile general relativity and quantum mechanics into one fundamental universal theory, however, the neural network idea suggests that the behaviors seen in both theories emerge from something deeper.

In certain conditions — near equilibrium — the learning behavior of a neural network can be approximately explained with the equations of quantum mechanics, but further away the laws of classical physics instead come into play.

“Coincidence? Maybe, but as far as we know quantum and classical mechanics is exactly how the physical world works,’ he told Futurism.

“The idea is definitely crazy, but if it is crazy enough to be true? That remains to be seen,” he added.

In addition, he explained, the theory could account for the so-called ‘hidden variables’ — unknown properties of objects proposed by some physicists to explain away the uncertainty inherent in most theories of quantum mechanics.

”In the emergent quantum mechanics which I considered, the hidden variables are the states of the individual neurons and the trainable variables — such as bias vector and weight matrix) are quantum variables,” Professor Vanchurin said.

In such a neural network, everything from particles and atoms to cells and beyond would emerge in a process analogous to evolution/natural selection, Professor Vanchurin suggested.

“There are structures of the microscopic neural network which are more stable and there are other structures which are less stable,” he told Futurism.

“The more stable structures would survive the evolution, and the less stable structure would be exterminated.

On the smallest scales, I expect that the natural selection should produce some very low complexity structures such as chains of neurons, but on larger scales, the structures would be more complicated.

I see no reason why this process should be confined to a particular length scale and so the claim is that everything that we see around us — e.g. particles, atoms, cells, observers, etc. — is the outcome of natural selection.”

Professor Vanchurin’s theory has been met with skepticism and physicists are certainly not ready to state the universe is neural network.

Having said this, it’s worth remembering the nature of our Universe has been questioned on several occasions before. Some scientists are convinced our Universe may in fact be a giant hologram.

Written by Cynthia McKanzie MessageToEagle.com Staff Writer