I dislike the idea of being courageous. Sure, it's a virtue and all, but what are we really saying when we speak of courage? Obviously, it means to act in spite of emotional resistance. However, although courage opposes fear, it is still defined in relation to it. Why accept the emotional conceptualization in the first place? Why not rather think in terms of tasks and volitions? "I act not because I have courage, but because I do what I want." These are not the same. What I like is the idea of … [Read more...]
Against Living Recursively
He who speaks of the Way is not walking it; but he who walks moves ahead. The True Will is no different: the more I speak of it, the less I do it. Unspoken it is done. — Yet may it be my Will itself to speak of it? Oh, it would consume itself, waste itself, in vain recursion! Hence I say no more. … [Read more...]
Blog Post Clustering: K-Means, NMF, LSA, LDA, and Autoencoder for NLP
It has been a while since I wrote my last blog post. This is because I rediscovered one of my great passions in life: coding. I have thus been spending all my free time lately programming and learning about data science: tons of math, statistics, machine learning algorithms, et cetera. You can see what I've coded so far on github.com/domreichl and kaggle.com/domreichl. Mostly, however, I took a lot of online courses in the past few months (edX and coursera are outstanding platforms to learn … [Read more...]
The Bayesian Brain: Placebo Effects Explained
In my article on predictive processing, I presented the Bayesian brain theory, which promises to explain everything about the brain and cognition. If true, the theory should be able to unravel some of the mysteries of the human mind. How is it possible, for instance, that a sham surgery and an actual arthroscopy for knee arthritis produce indistinguishable healing effects (Moseley et al. 2002)? And how could a surgeon in World War II operate on wounded soldiers with saltwater after he had run … [Read more...]
Great Minds Discuss Ideas, Great Men Also Discuss People
On great minds and great men Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people. I used to like that quote because it was often effective in stroking my ego. My natural inclination has always been to debate ideas, to devalue stories, and to detest gossip. Oh, what a great mind I must be! Yet what disposition of curiosity is actually revealed here? Apparently, I'm highly interested in abstract thinking, less interested in concrete events, and least interested … [Read more...]
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