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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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....
Nyar the Scientist
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 ...
The Relational Database Model and Predicate Logic
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...
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