There is a Feuerbachian quality to the ideas in the category "What if the universe works like an X?" X gets substituted with the misunderstood but prized tech du jour. We've gone from the clockwork universe[1] of mechanical philosophy[2] to the computational universe[3] and now taking a tangent to the neural network universe. If history is a guide, you can bet that what ever sufficiently exalted and misunderstood technology appears there will be an associated theory of the universe attached to it. It says more about us than it does about the universe.
Thank you for phrasing this so succinctly. Self-similarity pops up again and again in nature. Mostly we think of this in terms of geometry (fractals, etc...) but why couldn't self-similarity also apply to time oriented processes like cosmological evolution?
Not sure if we're in agreement then. Calling out the analogy as Feuerbachian is essentially saying that the analogies between technology and the universe are anthropological framed around our own ideals and not some universal truths.
The entire universe is always whatever the people looking at it know of but don't understand. It was a god, once, i.e. some guy. Then it was clockwork. Then it was a computer, then a quantum computer. Now, a neural network.
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[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_philosophy
[3] https://academic.oup.com/pq/article-abstract/53/211/243/1610...
Technology is the result of the evolutionary process of the universe. If the process resembles its own result, that shouldn't come as a surprise.
You must think the natural and artificial worlds as being self-similar. Think them as one continuous, self-organizing process.
What will it be next week?