Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

[Michael McMahon]

In my lucid dreams I usually don't have much free will in exerting control over the strange content I'm seeing, the actions I'm performing or even the thoughts entering into my mind. It feels more like I'm forcefully subjected to a chaotic or predetermined lucid dream rather than actively being the decider in what to do or see in a lucid dream. I'm a bit dazed at the onset of a lucid dream where I'm not in full control of my thoughts. I seem to possess some control of my dream character's internal emotional responses during a lucid dream. For example I might have some leeway in how fearful, curious or relaxed I respond to it without actually initiating whatever the visual images are in my dream. If I'm fearful I try to end the lucid dream as quickly as I can. In a semi-lucid dream where I'm almost but not fully conscious I might be able to vividly memorise the content without having the full self-awareness to think critically. I eventually regain full control of my memory and free thought in a lucid dream which would signal the ending of the lucid dream just before I wake up.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjg0NwsHCCA
Robert Stickgold - Mysteries of Free Will - 30 Oct 2021 - Closer To Truth

Robert Stickgold:
"I mean free will is a tricky question because we rarely in our waking life think about having free will. What we think about is making choices and that sort of comes automatically without sort of this metacognitive reflection of this is my choice. Sometimes there's the angst of making a choice where we're really aware of it but i think normally when we talk about free will it's for making the everyday decisions that we make all the time. What we notice when we're dreaming what our dreaming selves tend to notice is that we don't have that capacity; we don't feel like we have free will when we're dreaming. We feel like we're being taken up in the flow of events and although we're an active player in the dream we also feel like we're a passive observer who's just taken along. So whether we actually have free will such as we have in waking in dreams only seems to be the case when we have lucid dreaming and lucid dreaming is that state where people become aware of the fact that they're dreaming and when we do that we also gain a certain kind of control. So this is a different kind of control and free will because it's much more than we could imagine having in waking. So if you decided you wanted to fly free will wouldn't help you; you can't. But in a dream it can and so you can fly in the dream and when you become lucid. Interestingly when people become lucid of all the things they can freely choose to do in a dream flying is actually what they like to do most. But then what you see is you see the limits of that kind of free will because you can't for example like you can when you're awake just having a fantasy or doing some daydreaming. You can't put yourself in Paris by just deciding to. If you want to put yourself in Paris in a dream you have to walk through a door or walk around a corner or spin around in space for five seconds and stop and then you can suddenly be in Paris. So it's like you have control over some of those brain processes that we normally think of ourselves as having control over."

Robert Kuhn:
"So let's try to figure out if there's anything we can learn about the real free will in the waking state from dream state. We know that in in dreams if we don't have the same kind of sense of free will; we're sort of being taken by this (and) we also know that the forebrain is less active in the dreaming life than it is in... waking up."

Stickgold:
"That's right but it's even more than that so you've got the the the prefrontal cortex which is usually involved in decision making but in REM sleep you also have a change in the chemistry of the brain and the release of norepinephrine or noradrenaline and serotonin. Two major neural chemicals is completely shut off and those are the chemicals that your brain needs to direct action. You know if you want to really do something; you feel the adrenaline build up in your body that's matched by noradrenaline (which is) a slightly different chemical in your brain and they're really good at focusing your attention and initiating behaviours. In rem sleep those are completely shut off so not only don't you have the frontal control systems but you don't have the chemicals in your brain that would normally let you choose an option with free will."

Kuhn:
"So this seems to be at least the beginning of a biological clue as to the how free will can work... If we if we don't feel free will phenomenologically in our dreaming state and we see the biological... correlates in terms of the prefrontal areas of the brain and the the neurotransmitters that you're talking about; we see that correlation different in the dreaming state than in the waking state. We also have the phenomenology that in the dreaming state we have less free will apparently than in the waking state. Maybe that's beginning to be a nice correlation."

Stickgold:
"So let me tell you how it really works. What you have in fact with free will is a balance between these two neuromodulators norepinephrine and serotonin which are very good at bringing your attention back to a focus and to direct action. When you're in rem sleep you have an increase in the neuromodulator called acetylcholine and we know that shift allows for the brain to see more distant connections. Okay so if you're thinking about words and what they're connected to when you wake up out of rem sleep you will find more distantly related words than if you are awake or if you wake up out of non-rem sleep. What free will is about is letting your brain go cholinergic if you will. Consider the possibilities then coming back to norepinephrine and serotonin that'll focus you down onto one of those possibilities and then you either lock it in and choose it or you go back to the cholinergic state and have a new shaking of the bucket and another choice comes out. It's sort of an evolution on the second by second basis."

Robert:
"Now this is is fascinating in terms of its biology but we have a natural complexity here in that we're talking about the you doing this and then we're talking about the biological system making it happen. So is it the biology of the cholinergic, the acetylcholine and the combination between them and all this stuff is that the thing that is giving us the illusion of free will? Or is that us in some top order wanting to do this and therefore the biology is following that?"

Stickgold:
"I think the biology is following. I think that what the prefrontal cortex is doing and what free will in whatever form you want to define it is doing is it's deciding... it's no more meaningful to say that the free will is an illusion than to say that the chemicals are are an illusion. You're going to tell me that those chemicals decided i would go to the movie? That makes no sense to me. It's just a different level of description of the same process."

[Michael McMahon]

In some non-lucid dreams in the past I might be at a familiar location but in a different state of mind. I could be exploring behind my old estate and walking along the bypass before venturing off into the woodland. I do this in real life too but in the dream the sheer amount of solitude means that I'm much more intrigued by the novelty and excited by the scenery. It might seem as if I'm exploring an undiscovered territory where it seems endless in extent. Sometimes a location evokes different emotions such as being at school and playing or having a relaxed state of mind in the park. So to have our emotions and their locational context altered in a dream setting means we've more room to experiment with freedom of the will.

[Michael McMahon]

We don't instantly fall asleep. We close our eyes, our thoughts become digressive until it resembles a fantastical daydream and eventually the tangential ideas cement themselves into an actual dream. This process is repeated if we wake up momentarily in the morning and then head back to sleep. In one lie-in I thought about a plane doing an emergency landing on a public road and briefly wondered if it was OK if the plane crashed into the oncoming cars. That's as far as I went in the dream analysis and I awoke later to unpack the moral dilemma a bit more; "Would the cars have significantly damaged the plane? Are all the plane's passengers worth risking the lives of those in the car?" So what was only a fleeting thought-line in a dream became an ethical conundrum upon further inspection.

[Michael McMahon]

Last night I'd many non-lucid dreams who's sheer bizarreness emphasised how random they can be. Lucid dreaming can help memory recall for ordinary dreams as well. In one scene there was plot line where I was trying to advise someone not to have a bath in a washing machine. In another sequence I collected my computer from its storage location in a manhole on the street. I'd also a dream in which I was jumping down many steps past people on a windy and busy staircase. This was followed by traversing through a pipe and squeezing to let people pass me in the opposite direction. I remember witnessing a dream where I was a passenger in a car travelling over ropes left on the road where after I got out a police car rammed it off the road without warning and injured the driver. When it comes to free will I could say that our analysis of inchoate dreams doesn't have to be instantaneous and can occur silently and latently in our subconscious emotions.

[Michael McMahon]

When you relate the frame problem of artificial intelligence to ourselves and culture, then it's like the gazillions of years of random mutations in evolution combined with hundreds of thousands of years of societal communication and then the number of years lived in our own lives have all allowed us to instinctively suss out what's most relevant in an emotional, academic or practical problem.

https://stanford.library.sydney.edu.au/ ... e-problem/

[Michael McMahon]

Language has gotten significantly less complex than when Shakespeare spoke English. In terms of the frame problem we could say that hundreds of years of communication means we can speak more concisely even though it comes at a cost that we can't fully express a specific sensation in such detail. Another example is when we hit our head against a low garage door, we can learn through pain and emotional stress what is relevant rather than our analysis of trial and error by itself.

[Michael McMahon]

One version of a working backwards heuristic in a dream might be where our unconscious activates an unrefined emotion like fear apropos of nothing. Then our subconscious mind would immediately wonder about what is making us feel afraid. These ideas get reified such that our conscious mind experiences the sensation of fear simultaneous with the imagined sources of that fear. Thus the fear will be attributed to the perceived images in the dream rather than the unconscious itself.

[Michael McMahon]

We can rephrase that to say we also have to rationalise our own random emotions in a dream.

[Michael McMahon]

I'd two vivid non-lucid dreams last night. In the first one I appeared to be directing a train somehow. It felt like I was in a video game where I was creating the train tracks ahead of me and designing the outline of a rail network. If there was a gap in the track over a bridge then my train would go at top-speed to jump to the other side. I might have failed but if I did I'd simply be in a train again and I'd probably have retried. I woke up after that dream and I started breathing slowly because the sheer absurdity of the situation dazed me a bit. Later in the night I'd a separate dream in which I was on a river bank and observed a plane crashing vertically down into a hotel. I could see someone ahead of me and I had an intuition that this person was signalling the plane to come down by his hand movements. My point of view suddenly changed where I was in the hotel as a resident before the incident happened. I observed the plane skydiving above me and saw a silent explosion. The dream repeated such that I repeatedly the motion of people around me. Finally my point of view changed yet again where now I assumed the position of detective among a team of investigators. We were trying to determine if the plane crash was accidental or deliberate. They decided that the pilot had no motive and so it was probably an accident. I'd an uneasy feeling and I was trying to disagree with them because on one iteration I saw the pilot miraculously jump out over the cockpit window to see the target area. This dream illustrated to me how we can change our guise and persona in the dream and take up different perspectives.

[Michael McMahon]

(...repeated such that I SAW the motion of people...)

[Michael McMahon]

The plot of a dream could be random while the dream character's inner thoughts and verbal reaction to the events as we pass along each dream might be deterministic. This would be another example of the interplay between determinism and randomness.

[Michael McMahon]

If we could choose between a selection of brains for our own brain transplant where each has a different set of instructions for how we go about our day, then we'll only remember the selected brain because the other possible timelines will be forgotten about. Choosing one brain over another would be a display of free won't in having the power to reject the mindset of other brains. Dreaming is like glancing at the other available timelines.

[Michael McMahon]

If we weren't so busy with daily stresses then perhaps we'd take more notice of the zombies and monsters that frequent us during the night!

[Michael McMahon]

We often interpret animal minds to feel less physical pain and mental stress than human minds. Therefore an animal such as a dog isn't necessarily compelled by mental exhaustion to got to sleep in the same way we are. We go to sleep because we feel sleepy. Yet fatigue after all is still a form of stress and so if animals can't feel much stress then they can't feel much fatigue.

[Michael McMahon]

If an animal doesn't feel high anxiety levels then stress reduction might not be a central role of sleep in such creatures. Maybe sleep might be more involved in memory consolidation, sensory reaction speed practice, limb reflex improvements along with neurological, biological and cellular rest.