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Interesting that they study the "meaningfulness" of previously meaningless music - in a way I see a relationship to reinforcement learning, namely retroactively
by pizza 10y ago
Interesting that they study the "meaningfulness" of previously meaningless music - in a way I see a relationship to reinforcement learning, namely retroactively assigning meaning to recorded but undiscovered information from the environment.
"Information is a difference which makes a difference!"
- Alex3917 10y agoWhat's interesting about the study is that they're not looking at whether LSD actually helps to unlock deeper meaning, but rather they're looking at whether LSD increases the subjective feeling of meaning having been unlocked. I think it would be even more interesting to see how the former correlates with the latter, both with and without LSD.
- pizza 10y agoPrecisely; I feel there may be some insight as to why SSRIs appear to reduce the sense of entropy pervasive in anxiety and depression. Or from a more Slate star codex perspective, why antidepressants sort of seem to do more than they seem to do.
- language 10y agoVery glad to see references to Bateson here. To paraphrase some other cybernetician[s]: "Order and chaos are not a properties of things, but relations of an observer to something observed - the ability for an observer to distinguish or specify pattern."