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Showing posts from May, 2025

About Morality

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I actually think the following is totally obvious, but it doesn't seem like people like to agree with me on it. So far, I have not heard counter-arguments that could convince me. Of course I still cannot be certain that these arguments are correct, but here they are nonetheless.  I propose the following: Ethics is theoretically solved. The solution is utilitarianism.  Morality is just a simple subjective approximation of utilitarianism, and it does this because utilitarianism is approximately equal to egoism.  Firstly, I define morality as "what feels right to do (subjective, depends on the individual)" ethics as "how we should actually act (objectively)" "we should do X" as "We want to live in a world where we do X" (similar to Kant's categorical imperative) utilitarianism as "what is best for the world, all things considered" (genetic) egoism as "what is the best action for the survival of my genes" If we want to fin...
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 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....
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