electron brian

After coming up with these two theories of what I think the feeling of meaning or purpose  is , the neuronal basis of the feeling was still unclear to me. I thought it might be a different mechanism than reward prediction (dopamine), or at least a different neurotransmitter, which causes a "rush of meaning" rather than the more hedonic "dopamine rush". However, I now think it may be much simpler, and reading more about dopamine (mainly Getting Formal with Dopamine and Reward (Wolfram Schultz, 2002).Almost all the biological claims I use for my argument are from that paper) really convinced me: Both are dopamine, but in different brain regions! Dopaminergic pathways (What is a dopaminergic pathway? A bunch of axons which send electrical signals from area A to B and release dopamine in B (the cell bodies are in A, their axonal projections go all the way to B)) The brain uses dopamine in different ways. Dopamine release in one area will not do the same thing as dopami...

  In my opinion, the following is true and even pretty obvious:   Ethics is theoretically solved. The solution is utilitarianism.  Morality is just a simple approximation (by a subject) of utilitarianism, which the subject creates because utilitarianism approximates egoism well.  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 find causal explanations in human behavior, we have to add up the causal effects of genetics and nurture. Genetics is mostly explained by evolution, and for pre-modern human behavior, nurture is a weak argument, because evolution had time to adapt to ...

  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.   Imagine an agent (eg. an anim...

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...