Notes: The Entropic Neuron
Chapter notes for “The Entropic Neuron”
Notes
1 Stieg, A. Z., et al., “Emergent criticality in complex Turing B-type atomic switch networks,” Advanced Materials 24 (2012): 286-293; Avizienis, A. V., et al., “Neuromorphic atomic switch networks,” PLOS ONE 7(8) (2012): e42772. Random meshes of metallic nanowires exhibit emergent criticality with power-law scaling reminiscent of biological neural networks, performing learning and logic operations through self-organization in response to electrical inputs. The result demonstrates that computation can arise from physical dissipation without neurons or programming.
2 Caraffa (2026), BEDS (Bayesian Entropic Dissipative Systems) framework. Formalizes the connection between belief precision and thermodynamic power expenditure, establishing that maintaining accurate internal models requires a minimum rate of energy dissipation. Learning, in this formalism, is literally a thermodynamic process with a quantifiable cost per bit of precision gained.
3 Song, S., et al., “Highly nonrandom features of synaptic connectivity in local cortical circuits,” PLOS Biology 3(3) (2005): e68; Perin, R., et al., “A synaptic organizing principle for cortical neuronal groups,” PNAS 108(13) (2011): 5419-5424. These studies found that bidirectional synaptic connections in cortical circuits are approximately four times more common than chance predicts and roughly 50% stronger than unidirectional ones. The overrepresentation of reciprocal connections provides direct biological evidence for the mutuality criterion central to the entropic neuron hypothesis.
4 Minsky, Marvin, The Society of Mind (Simon & Schuster, 1986). Minsky proposed that minds are “societies” of simple agents whose interactions produce complex cognition. The entropic neuron framework extends this by grounding the cooperation of agents in thermodynamic selection rather than computational design, explaining why the agents cooperate rather than merely describing that they do.
46a Deco, Gustavo, Yonatan Sanz Perl, and Morten L. Kringelbach. “Complex harmonics reveal low-dimensional manifolds of critical brain dynamics.” Physical Review E 111, 014410 (2025).