electron brian

 Two theories of the feeling of meaning What causes a thing in one's life to feel meaningful or purposeful? Meaning seems like a sort of higher order motivation - The driving force which creates motivation. I will present two mechanisms that I believe might create meaning: low confidence reward prediction, and association. These theories seem to match our observations quite well and they are well fitted for being explained further and tested on a lower (cellular) level of neuroscience. Each mechanism is a theory of the creation of meaning, though I am not sure if they work together, or if they are just different formulations of the same mechanism.  1) Reward prediction theory of meaning background a) reinforcement learning Reinforcement learning describes how animals learn from experience, specifically how positive and negative outcomes of practice actions are used by the brain to adapt behaviour in such a way that future actions are more likely to yield positive outcomes....

After a couple of months of working with MySQL Databases and cowardishly ignoring the fact that I did not have a clue why table-based databases are called "relational", I finally gave in and heroically opened the Wikipedia entry "Relational database". It turns out that the explanation of the name is actually quite interesting - if you are insane. Anyways, here we go. The relational model for databases is a predicate logic. But what is predicate logic again? Predicate logic / first order logic is a collection of formal systems with certain allowed features. And the relational model is such a formal system. So what are the rules of predicate logic and what does a database with a table have to do with it?  First, let me introduce some logics terms:    Proposition: formally, a function from the set of possible worlds to {True, False}. Eg. "The sky is yellow" - true in one world, false in another.  Formula: well-formed set of symbols (eg. `x \Rightarrow (y \wed...

Heritage of the Yusata When I was young and still lived with my family, there was a beautiful monastery to be found at the far end of a quite idyllic path starting from the other end of our village. Our village was small enough for you to have some direct or indirect association with a good portion of the people there, but no one ever knew any of the monks personally. The monastery was active until I was 6 years old. I cannot remember much of it, but my granddad often tells stories of the about one dozen monks that lived there. For a number of reasons that became clear to me much later, he became increasingly interested in them and their religion. Thinking back to it now, it was maybe not very fitting that we insisted on calling them monks. One thing I do remember is that every once in a while you saw one of the monks going for walks in the nearby forests and plains. Over time I noticed more and more obviously strange behaviours in them, such as ever so slightly distorted mimics. They ...

Corruption of the Night Sky There used to be such pretty nights when I was younger. Nights that seeded optimism regarding humanity's place in the universe. Piercing stars surrounded by a deep darkness, that made you dream of infinity. The night sky was a window to a different world - one full of miracles, and hope. And if you had a telescope, then you had a portal to teleport yourself into the void. But lately, a lot had changed.  The atmosphere of the night had become uncomfortable, even hostile. You could hear metallic echoing, like blood streaming in metal pipes. The rain sounded accidental, like the crackling of a broken radio. The sky was pressing down right on ones head, and the stars behind it were being insulted by a toxic orange veil. I had no better explanation for the colour other than that it had been vomited out by a dying animal. The sky was no longer a symbol of hope for humanity, but rather one of pollution, entrapment and rage.  The village i had grown up in h...

 Nyar the scientist ---Prologue--- A man of political importance hastily knocks the door of the local priest. After the priest calls him to enter, he allows him speak. The man reports that he needs the priest's help deciphering strange repeated messages that have been appearing over the last couple of days. He states, that kids had been fishing the messages out of the nearby river. The priest listens and asks the man to reveal the messages to him, which he then promptly starts reading. He thinks for a while and then starts explaining to the man what he understood from the text.  The two are located in a circular, sacred shelter built out of thin tree trunks and roots, and overgrown with different types of vines. A small fire is burning in the middle of a room, blessing the two men with heat and light in the otherwise quite uncomfortable night. The two can be quietly heard, but not understood, by the small number of excited observers outside the shelter, as they are discussing ...

Dan's Descent There is a little insignificant village close to Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, where when you walk down its main road after sunset and look to your left after passing the towns church, you will see a large, wooden house. And the first floor window shows a glance into a cozy living room. One day, the room's fireplace bathed the room in a warm, yellow light. And if you had been inside that living room, rather than outside in the thunderstorm that was going on all evening, you would now remember conversations that had started off as gossip, but were then advancing into ever darker territory as the night grew older.  A female voice initiated one of these advancements: "You know the little cabin, just about 200 meters into the woods behind their house? That's where the little Dan always used to go. The Seiders own quite a bit of those woods actually. Little Dan was able to build the cabin himself, at the age of 16. Oh, what a driven fellow he was, such an awful trag...