{"id":241733,"date":"2026-07-28T21:01:28","date_gmt":"2026-07-29T02:01:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/07\/the-world-as-a-neural-network"},"modified":"2026-07-28T21:01:28","modified_gmt":"2026-07-29T02:01:28","slug":"the-world-as-a-neural-network","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/07\/the-world-as-a-neural-network","title":{"rendered":"The World as a Neural Network"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/the-world-as-a-neural-network.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>We discuss a possibility that the entire universe on its most fundamental level is a neural network. We identify two different types of dynamical degrees of freedom: \u201ctrainable\u201d variables (e.g., bias vector or weight matrix) and \u201chidden\u201d variables (e.g., state vector of neurons). We first consider stochastic evolution of the trainable variables to argue that near equilibrium their dynamics is well approximated by Madelung equations (with free energy representing the phase) and further away from the equilibrium by Hamilton\u2013Jacobi equations (with free energy representing the Hamilton\u2019s principal function). This shows that the trainable variables can indeed exhibit classical and quantum behaviors with the state vector of neurons representing the hidden variables.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We discuss a possibility that the entire universe on its most fundamental level is a neural network. We identify two different types of dynamical degrees of freedom: \u201ctrainable\u201d variables (e.g., bias vector or weight matrix) and \u201chidden\u201d variables (e.g., state vector of neurons). We first consider stochastic evolution of the trainable variables to argue that [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,1617,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-241733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-information-science","category-quantum-physics","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=241733"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241733\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=241733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=241733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=241733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}