In August 2020, Vitaly Vanchurin, a theoretical physicist at the University of Minnesota, posted a paper on arXiv with a title that made his colleagues’ eyes twitch: “The World as a Neural Network.”
The title reads literally: “The World as a Neural Network.” Ontologically, without analogies: the world is a neural network.
People noticed. Reactions fell into three categories. Physicists said, “Interesting, but how do you disprove it? — if you can’t, it isn’t science.” Machine-learning specialists said, “Sounds insane, but the math is consistent.” Science journalists said, “We live in the Matrix?!” (No. Not the Matrix. But we’ll get back to that.)