Care and Feeding of Neural Nets

Recently I asked myself the question, “Plants need air, soil, water, and sunlight to live; animals need air, food, and water. What does a neural net need to live?”

The answer, I realized, was “A steady diet of entropy that can be converted to negentropy.”

As biological machines, we consume matter at a lower entropy state and excrete matter at a higher entropy state; this is what fuels our metabolism. As neural machines, we consume information at higher entropy states and excrete information at lower entropy states; this is what fuels our intellect.

In other words, our minds consume disordered information and excrete ordered information. This is what our neural nets need in order to stay alive, just as our bodies need air, water, and food to maintain homeostasis.

By nature of the very processes that make us conscious, our minds exude order the same way our bodies excrete piss and shit.

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