[clarle]

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.

[0xBABAD00C]

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

[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

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.

[mcbuilder]

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

[mxkopy]

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

[__loam]

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

[0xBABAD00C]

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.

[opportune]

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

[0xBABAD00C]

> 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...

[joe_the_user]

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.

[Retric]

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.

[d0gsg0w00f]

    > 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.

[mensetmanusman]

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.