Connectome
= " a term that refers to the complete wiring diagram of the brain, which is formed by neurons and their synaptic connections". [1]
Description
Bobby Azarian:
"The “connectome,” a term that refers to the complete wiring diagram of the brain, which is formed by neurons and their synaptic connections. Neurons in the brain also form clusters, which are grouped into larger clusters, and are connected by filaments called axons, which transmit electrical signals across the cognitive system."
(https://bigthink.com/hard-science/the-universe-may-be-a-giant-neural-network-heres-why/)
Discussion
The Cosmic Web as a Connectome
< The cosmos is a “connectome”! >
Bobby Azarian:
"The idea that the Universe is something like an organism or a brain isn’t a new one. This concept goes back at least to 500 B.C. when it was first dreamed up by Anaxagoras. The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher proposed that an intelligent cosmic force, or “Nous,” guides the development of the Universe toward a more organized and purposeful state of existence. Today we might describe Nous as the principle of self-organization.
While the specifics of Anaxagoras’ theory of the Universe contain concepts that are not consistent with modern science, breakthroughs in our understanding of the nature of reality are breathing new life into the idea that the world as a whole may be very similar in structure and function to the biological organisms and information networks it has produced through the evolutionary process.
In recent years, a number of highly respected theoretical physicists and scientists from various fields have published papers, articles, and books that have provided compelling technical and mathematical arguments that suggest the Universe is not just a computational or information-processing system, but a self-organizing system that evolves and learns in ways that are strikingly similar to biological systems.
For example, scientists have recently emphasized that the physical organization of the Universe mirrors the structure of a brain. Theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder — renowned for her skepticism — wrote a bold article for Time Magazine in August of 2022 titled “Maybe the Universe Thinks. Hear Me Out,” which describes the similarities. Like our nervous system, the Universe has a highly interconnected, hierarchical organization. The estimated 200 billion detectable galaxies aren’t distributed randomly, but lumped together by gravity into clusters that form even larger clusters, which are connected to one another by “galactic filaments,” or long thin threads of galaxies. When one zooms out to envision the cosmos as a whole, the “cosmic web” formed by these clusters and filaments looks strikingly similar to the “connectome,” a term that refers to the complete wiring diagram of the brain, which is formed by neurons and their synaptic connections. Neurons in the brain also form clusters, which are grouped into larger clusters, and are connected by filaments called axons, which transmit electrical signals across the cognitive system.
Hossenfelder explains that this resemblance between the cosmic web and the connectome is not superficial, citing a rigorous study by a physicist and a neuroscientist that analyzed the features common to both, and based on the shared mathematical properties, concluded that the two structures are “remarkably similar.” Due to these uncanny similarities, Hossenfelder speculates as to whether the Universe itself could be thinking.
Of course, it takes more than a certain type of structure to think thoughts. A dead brain is just as thoughtless as a rock. The information processing that corresponds to thinking is made possible by neuronal signaling, in which electrical messages are passed from one area of the brain to another. What signals could the Universe be transmitting along these galactic filaments, and could they allow for some type of cosmic intelligence?
Yet the Universe’s vastness imposes limitations. Hossenfelder explains that sending signals across the cosmos, even at light speed, would take 80 billion years, and 11 million years just for a signal to travel to our nearest galaxy. Combine the vast size of the Universe with the fact that it is expanding, and it would seem like some kind of cosmic-scale information processing similar to the global processing going on inside brains is out of the question.
But Hossenfelder speculates over whether “hidden connections” could allow for faster signaling. In a section called “Everything is Connected,” she explains how mechanisms like quantum entanglement or other forms of “non-local connections” could enable longer-range computations.
“A non-locally connected Universe would make sense for many reasons,” Hossenfelder writes. “If these speculations are correct, the Universe might be chock full of tiny portals that connect seemingly distant places. The physicists Fotini Markopoulou and Lee Smolin estimated that our Universe could contain as much as 10 (to the 360 power) of such non-local connections. And since the connections are non-local anyway, it doesn’t matter that they expand with the Universe. The human brain, for comparison, has a measly 10 (to the 15th power) connections.”
...
Although highly speculative, it could help explain the mysterious synchronies between structures on opposite sides of the Universe that have been observed recently. For example, a 2019 study in The Astrophysical Journal described an unexplained coherence between the motions of galaxies that were many millions of light years away — too large a distance for them to have any gravitational influence on each other. Similarly, in 2014 the European Observatory announced that they had discovered bizarre alignments between the rotations of extremely distant supermassive black holes, along with similar coherence among distant quasars (luminous galactic nuclei). If that weren’t strange enough, the rotations of the quasars also seemed to be aligned with the motions of the larger cosmic structures they are embedded in."
(https://bigthink.com/hard-science/the-universe-may-be-a-giant-neural-network-heres-why/)
More information
Articles
* Article: The World as a Neural Network. By Vitaly Vanchurin. Entropy, 2020.
Bobby Azarian:
"In 2020, theoretical physicist Vitaly Vanchurin published a landmark paper titled “The World as a Neural Network” in the journal Entropy. Where Hossenfelder described the structural organization of the Universe to be brain-like, Vanchurin argues that the world is literally a neural network, with an interconnected network of “nodes” existing at the microscopic scale that is equivalent to the network of neurons inside our skulls. This network allows the Universe not just to evolve, but to learn, and it is a hypothesis that may actually be testable someday.
“A working hypothesis is that on the most fundamental level the dynamics of the entire Universe is described by a microscopic neural network which undergoes learning evolution.”
* Article: The Autodidactic Universe. By Lee Smolin, Jaron Lanier, et al.
URL = https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.03902
Bobby Azarian:
"In 2021, a similar paper was published by some high-profile scientists, physicist Lee Smolin and computer scientist Jaron Lanier among them, called The Autodidactic Universe, which inspired sensational headlines like “Physicists working with Microsoft think the Universe is a self-learning computer.” The paper proposes that the cosmos may possess an innate ability to learn, adapt, and evolve in a manner akin to a living organism. This view diverges from conventional theories of everything, which typically treat the Universe as an inert system governed by unchanging laws. By contrast, Smolin and Lanier posit that the laws of the Universe might emerge sometime after its creation, and those laws might change or evolve as the cosmos develops and learns more about its own structure, dynamics, and possibilities.
Like the Vanchurin paper, the authors argue that the Universe shares many critical features with neural networks, and they also emphasize that the Universe evolves through Darwinian mechanisms, which are evolutionary processes but also learning processes that create information, complexity, and a hierarchical organization. If their big ideas are correct, then this emerging theory of everything has the power to unite physics and biology.
Jaron Lanier, a pioneer of virtual reality, told podcast host Lex Fridman, “There’s been a zillion papers about how you can think of the Universe as a big neural net, or how you can think of different ideas in physics as being quite similar to, or even equivalent to, some of the ideas in machine learning, and that actually works out crazy well. That actually is kind of eerie.”
(https://bigthink.com/hard-science/the-universe-may-be-a-giant-neural-network-heres-why/)