Not an expert (so this could well be slightly off), but here is a physics analogy: You're rolling a ball down a plank of wood and you want it to roll off the p

Not an expert (so this could well be slightly off), but here is a physics analogy: You're rolling a ball down a plank of wood and you want it to roll off the plank and continue to a certain spot on the ground. You know that if the ball rolls past the target, you have to angle the ramp lower. If it fails to reach the target, you angle the ramp higher. If it goes past by a lot, you make a big change to the ramp angle. If it goes past by a little, you make a small change to the ramp angle. In this way your error tells you something about the adjustment you need to make to the system to produce the desired output. Think of a function from the ramp angle (network weights) to how far the ball lands from the target (the error). The derivative of this function tells you what kind of change in angle results in what kind of change in the error, and you can use that to update the ramp until you hit the target. To say that the model is differentiable is to say that it's possible to infer from the error what kind of changes you need to make to the weights.