126 research outputs found
Experiencing the world with archetypal symbols: A new form of aesthetics.
According to the theories of symbolic interactionism, phenomenology of perception and archetypes, we argue that symbols play the key role in translating the information from the physical world to the human experience, and archetypes are the universal knowledge of cognition that generates the background of human experience (the life-world). Therefore, we propose a conceptual framework that depicts how people experience the world with symbols, and how archetypes relate the deepest level of human experience. This framework indicates a new direction of research on memory and emotion, and also suggests that archetypal symbolism can be a new resource of aesthetic experience design.Postprint (published version
Freedom in Nature
The paper starts with the proposal that the cause of the apparent
insolubility of the free-will problem are several popular but strongly
metaphysical notions and hypotheses. To reduce the metaphysics, some ideas are
borrowed from physics. A concept of event causality is discussed. The
importance of Hume's Principle of Causality is stressed and his Principle of
Causation is weakened. The key concept of the paper, the so-called relative
freedom, is also suggested by physics. It is a kind of freedom that can be
observed everywhere in nature. Turning to biology, incomplete knowledge is
defined for all organisms. They cope with the problem by Popper's trial and
error processes. One source of their success is the relative freedom of choice
from the basic option ranges: mutations, motions and neural connections.
Finally, the conjecture is adopted that communicability can be used as a
criterion of consciousness and free will is defined as a conscious version of
relative freedom. The resulting notion is logically self-consistent and it
describes an observable phenomenon that agrees with our experience.Comment: Changes: Improved formulation, three references added; 22 pages, no
figure. Comments are welcom
Scale-free memory model for multiagent reinforcement learning. Mean field approximation and rock-paper-scissors dynamics
A continuous time model for multiagent systems governed by reinforcement
learning with scale-free memory is developed. The agents are assumed to act
independently of one another in optimizing their choice of possible actions via
trial-and-error search. To gain awareness about the action value the agents
accumulate in their memory the rewards obtained from taking a specific action
at each moment of time. The contribution of the rewards in the past to the
agent current perception of action value is described by an integral operator
with a power-law kernel. Finally a fractional differential equation governing
the system dynamics is obtained. The agents are considered to interact with one
another implicitly via the reward of one agent depending on the choice of the
other agents. The pairwise interaction model is adopted to describe this
effect. As a specific example of systems with non-transitive interactions, a
two agent and three agent systems of the rock-paper-scissors type are analyzed
in detail, including the stability analysis and numerical simulation.
Scale-free memory is demonstrated to cause complex dynamics of the systems at
hand. In particular, it is shown that there can be simultaneously two modes of
the system instability undergoing subcritical and supercritical bifurcation,
with the latter one exhibiting anomalous oscillations with the amplitude and
period growing with time. Besides, the instability onset via this supercritical
mode may be regarded as "altruism self-organization". For the three agent
system the instability dynamics is found to be rather irregular and can be
composed of alternate fragments of oscillations different in their properties.Comment: 17 pages, 7 figur
Procedural and declarative knowledge: an evolutionary perspective
It appears that there are resemblances in the organization of
memory and the visual system, although the functions of these faculties
differ considerably. In this article, the principles behind this organization
are discussed. One important principle regards the distinction between
declarative and procedural knowledge, between knowing that and knowing
how. Declarative knowledge is considered here not as an alternative kind of
knowledge, as is usually the case in theories of memory, but as part of
procedural knowledge. In our view this leads to another approach with
respect to the distinction. Declarative knowledge has occupied more
attention in (cognitive) psychological research than can be justified on the
basis of the importance of procedural knowledge for behavior. We also
discuss the question whether there are other brain faculties that reflect the
same organizational characteristics. We conclude with some speculations
about the consequent role of consciousness in such a tentative model
Effects of sleep deprivation on neural functioning: an integrative review
Sleep deprivation has a broad variety of effects on human performance and neural functioning that manifest themselves at different levels of description. On a macroscopic level, sleep deprivation mainly affects executive functions, especially in novel tasks. Macroscopic and mesoscopic effects of sleep deprivation on brain activity include reduced cortical responsiveness to incoming stimuli, reflecting reduced attention. On a microscopic level, sleep deprivation is associated with increased levels of adenosine, a neuromodulator that has a general inhibitory effect on neural activity. The inhibition of cholinergic nuclei appears particularly relevant, as the associated decrease in cortical acetylcholine seems to cause effects of sleep deprivation on macroscopic brain activity. In general, however, the relationships between the neural effects of sleep deprivation across observation scales are poorly understood and uncovering these relationships should be a primary target in future research
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