Could it be that every language game played by humans belongs to one of two basic types? Let's start exploring this idea by labeling the categories: Technical language is precise and scientific. As the language of facts, it requires coherence.Sentimental language is neither precise nor scientific. As the language of feelings, it requires valence. I reckon that much of human misunderstanding, including dissents on the nature of truth, stems from the confusion of these two kinds of language. … [Read more...]
Who Needs Courage?
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...]
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