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 |    Not for the faint of art. |
| I've noted this article's thesis in a previous blog entry. Good to know it's not just my drunk ass that picks up on these things. The Strange Similarity of Neuron and Galaxy Networks  Your life’s memories could, in principle, be stored in the universe’s structure. I'm not sure that the subheading there is strictly accurate. But the physical similarity between the mid-scale structure of the universe and the neural mapping of the brain is too similar to be ignored. Not that there's anything supernatural at play here; patterns often repeat themselves in nature for perfectly ordinary reasons, such as the way we find Fibonacci's number in all manner of structures... but that's not important right now. We have predicted that the void-filament boundary is one of the most complex volumes of the universe, as measured by the number of bits of information it takes to describe it. This got us to thinking: Is it more complex than the brain? I suspect it has to do with exactly how complexity is defined. The speed of light puts a hard limit on how information can be transmitted through such megastructures, whereas the speed of information in the brain, while much slower than the speed of light, is fast enough for our purposes. The first results from our comparison are truly surprising: Not only are the complexities of the brain and cosmic web actually similar, but so are their structures. The universe may be self-similar across scales that differ in size by a factor of a billion billion billion. Physical similarity, however, doesn't automatically translate to similarity of utility. The article, while fascinating, doesn't really lend itself to a lot more quoting, especially since my own gray matter is perhaps just a bit disordered right now, thanks to a generous infusion of simple molecules involving carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. But it's worth reading, if only as an example of what can happen when you get two vastly different scientific specialties together to compare notes. It's out of such things that creativity arises, I think -- that finding of similarities in things that are, at first glance, disparate. But I will quote one more bit, because it relates to a phenomenon I've mentioned in here fairly recently. Is the apparent similarity just the human tendency to perceive meaningful patterns in random data (apophenia)? Remarkably enough, the answer seems to be no: Statistical analysis shows these systems do indeed present quantitative similarities. Now, I should probably emphasize that no, this doesn't mean that there's some mystical or metaphysical conclusion to be reached here. But, materialist that I am, I'm also a writer (of sorts) and this kind of thing is one reason why science fiction exists. Could the universe itself have a kind of consciousness? My instinct is to scoff at such an idea, but really, no one really knows what consciousness is, even though one must possess it in order to even ask the question. But soon it will be time for me to experience its opposite for a few hours. I just thought I'd leave this here for your neural networks to contemplate. Edit: After completing this entry, as I usually do after one of these entries, I checked the website Astronomy Picture of the Day, which updates around midnight EST. In another cosmic coincidence, today's picture is of a computer simulation that closely resembles the structure of the universe on these cosmic scales, and so I present it as another illustration of the superficial similarity between the universe and a neural net. |
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