Synchronicity Network

Unlike the principal of flight, the principal of consciousness is an unsolved problem. Before airplanes, people tried to build flying machines that emulated birds, but it turned out that replicating the complexity of birds was unnecessary. We still can’t build machines that are as complex as a bird.

Synchronicity is a concept which holds that events are “meaningful coincidences” if they occur with no causal relationship yet seem to be meaningfully related. What if this is the principal of consciousness? I propose an asynchronous neural network where the weights represent time delays between neurons, and the weights and connections between neurons can be asymmetric. In chip design timing is a difficult problem to solve, but with this proposed architecture timing is the solution.

The inspiration for this idea comes from The Cellular Automaton Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics via Hacker News, and I have also been doing work related to cellular automaton. There is an idea that cellular automaton are the root of reality, and this reality is deterministic. I want a way to add uncertainty back into the universe. Random fluctuations in the gravitational field would randomize communications delays for the cellular automaton. This would pump entropy into the universe and keep things interesting. I think the human brain is isomorphic to the universe (or is it the other way around?).