Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

Discuss any topics related to metaphysics (the philosophical study of the principles of reality) or epistemology (the philosophical study of knowledge) in this forum.
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Michael McMahon
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

Post by Michael McMahon »

“The working backward heuristic is a method of problem solving in which an individual imagines they have already solved the problem they are trying to solve. By imagining the problem is solved they can then work backwards in their mind and eventually visualize a solution to the problem. By trying to find the multiple connections from a problem to a solution one can use the connections to discover a suitable solution. The working backward heuristic is commonly used in mathematics and logic problems.”
https://www.alleydog.com/glossary/defin ... +Heuristic

In a dream we are able to imagine a simple outcome and then deduce what complex series of events must have happened for us to get to that point. This process could serve as general practice and training to help our creative and analytical skills.

Heuristic definition:
enabling someone to discover or learn something for themselves.
proceeding to a solution by trial and error or by rules that are only loosely defined.
Michael McMahon
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

Post by Michael McMahon »

Wossname wrote: March 28th, 2020, 2:18 pm Incidentally Michael many psychologists would agree with you that the brain does a lot of work subconsciously. Arguably conscious awareness occurs after this work has been done. Consider, if you can remember your mother’s maiden name (try it now), you don’t really know how you did it. It just pops out. You get the result of the process but the process itself is hidden from you.
There’s the past, present and future. Does the present moment include our immediate memory of the past few milliseconds? Then the present moment takes up some span of time. It stretches into the infinitesimal past. Although if we lost so much memory that we can’t even remember the past few moments, that means we’re not fully “present”. So maybe we’re always slightly conscious throughout sleep; it’s just that we instantly forget the preceding instant. So a vivid dream would equate to a dream with more retrospective memory of the past dream events; thereby increasing the degree of the already pre-existing awareness and the overall extent of dream consciousness.

“People often refer to this as being "zoned out" or on "autopilot." This ability to do something without really thinking is an example of a phenomenon that psychologists call automaticity.”
https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-au ... ty-2795018
Our thoughts are on “autopilot” mode during sleep.
Michael McMahon
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

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Decryption: “to change electronic information or signals that were stored, written, or sent in the form of a secret code (= a system of letters, numbers, or symbols) back into a form that you can understand and use normally.”

The more relatable and meaningful a dream scenario is, the easier it will be to “decrypt” it. This deciphering can be achieved through either the subconscious or in the case of vivid dreams by our conscious mind. But if we can’t make head nor tale of the sequence of events, it’ll remain encrypted and forgotten. We are “attracted” to positive dreams while we are deterred and “repelled” by stranger or nastier dreams.

“Every magnet has both a north and a south pole. When you place the north pole of one magnet near the south pole of another magnet, they are attracted to one another.
When you place like poles of two magnets near each other (north to north or south to south), they will repel each other.”
- kjmagnetics
Michael McMahon
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

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Sculptor1 wrote: December 21st, 2020, 11:51 am I've always felt that dreams are a sort of sorting out process. I think encryption is a far too formal word to describe what is going on here...
Sleep deprived people can get pretty screwed up - there is no doubt that something is happening here.
Everyone has a sense of self-awareness since the age of a young child. So if there’s a mechanism for free will, it doesn’t have to be direct and exhaustive. People dream from a young age so if dreams contribute to free will, it doesn’t have to happen over only one night. Therefore one dream in particular could refreshen free will rather than being the entire immediate source of it. Perhaps free will could arise from the accumulative effect of years worth of dreams.
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

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Michael McMahon wrote: December 27th, 2020, 10:29 am
Sculptor1 wrote: December 21st, 2020, 11:51 am I've always felt that dreams are a sort of sorting out process. I think encryption is a far too formal word to describe what is going on here...
Sleep deprived people can get pretty screwed up - there is no doubt that something is happening here.
Everyone has a sense of self-awareness since the age of a young child. So if there’s a mechanism for free will, it doesn’t have to be direct and exhaustive. People dream from a young age so if dreams contribute to free will, it doesn’t have to happen over only one night. Therefore one dream in particular could refreshen free will rather than being the entire immediate source of it. Perhaps free will could arise from the accumulative effect of years worth of dreams.
How can will be free?
Michael McMahon
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

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Sculptor1 wrote: December 27th, 2020, 3:37 pm How can will be free?
To begin with, lets separate free will from the hard problem of consciousness. We’ll presuppose that consciousness already exists. That lets us ignore how matter can even give rise to consciousness. This is so that we can focus solely on how that brute fact of conscious experience can gradually achieve free will.

Maybe a compatibilist way to approach that problem is that the physical cause of free will is the chaotic nature of our perception of the world around us. That is to say it doesn’t have to be the actual technical chaotic motion of matter per se. It’s only the fact that material objects and unfolding events appear unpredictable and chaotic relative to our subjective perception, our understanding of the present moment and then our own uncertainty of what the future is. Dreams can further underscore this baseline uncertainty.

Although even if the source of free will is unpredictable chaos, the way in which we decide to use free will eventually becomes repetitive. Therefore we can still slightly predict what we’d do in a given situation. Over time, this gets more and more ingrained so that we each have our hardwired habits. It takes more effort and mental energy to freely break our routines as we get older. The rewarding feeling of happiness that makes us want to try to get something might itself have deterministic components. This is in the same way that the conscious pain of a tummy bug is involuntary and outside of our control even though we’re flexible in the way we respond and try to alleviate it by lying down or taking medication. We can infer what type of personality other people have and people usually don’t change suddenly. Our sensation of free will allows us to be resourceful and improvise around hurdles to achieve our objectives.

That said, the way in which we balance the interplay between short-term planning versus long-term goals is equally complex. This can be energetically seen in the discussion below about the feedback loop of an immediate mission versus overall objectives:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TI8fBxHrUvs
Michael McMahon
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

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“For example, let A be William Shakespeare and B Francis Bacon, and let V1 [the outgoing tachyonic velocity] be negative. If Shakespeare types out Hamlet on his tachyon transmitter, Bacon receives the transmission at some earlier time. But no amount of reinterpretation will make Bacon the author of Hamlet. It is Shakespeare, not Bacon, who exercises control over the content of the message (265).”
- reasonablefaith org

Could this situation be avoided by stipulating that a time signal could only be sent to the very same person that wrote it? So there’d be no one else capable of retrieving it. The message would really just be a note to self.



“The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare.”
-Wikipedia

This problem sidesteps the issue of how the mere random firing of the actual neurons themselves within Shakespeares brain managed to come up with his abstract plays and poems.



“Apart from other oddities, the equations for energy and momentum for such particles reveal that tachyons would accelerate as they lose energy. Conversely, whenever energy was imparted to a tachyon, it would decelerate.”
https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writing ... niscience/

So it’d be as if by losing mental energy we’d be accelerating through time.



“A device capable of "telegraphing into the past" was later also called a "tachyonic antitelephone" by Gregory Benford et al. According to the current understanding of physics, no such faster-than-light transfer of information is actually possible.” (Wikipedia)

In a dream we are essentially “phoning” our past selves with any new information that we’ve acquired. We observe the dream character’s actions as a sort of counterfactual experiment. After having observed the outcome we can then erase the superfluous contents of these “phone calls” so that we don’t get distracted when we awaken. All the while our subconscious can analyse the information as a reminder of what’s to be done and as an aid to guide our motivation.



https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TxRnzLv5HOE
We don’t have one continuous dream while we’re asleep but rather many distinct dreams in quick succession. We are utilising our “veto power” by escaping one dream as we move on to another. So the way we meander from one dream to a different one could be an expression of our “free won’t”.
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

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"Veto power" is function of conscious awareness which is mediated by neurochemicals.

Deep sleep and dreaming result from separate , almost all-or-nothing, ebbs and flows of neurochemicals.

M M wrote (23 Dec):
In a dream we are able to imagine a simple outcome and then deduce what complex series of events must have happened for us to get to that point. This process could serve as general practice and training to help our creative and analytical skills.
Same can be truly said of any fiction with a psychological narrative theme.
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

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Belindi wrote: December 30th, 2020, 6:24 am Same can be truly said of any fiction with a psychological narrative theme.
Yes dreams can be a sort of unusual fiction. I don’t know exactly what dreams are and they are still very mysterious. But I suspect that there’s far more to it than we currently understand. Historical mysteries seemed to be prolonged by the fact that a particular feature of an object was ignored as being intrinsic to it. This is instead of properly recognising it as an independent impulse as seen in the quote below. I don’t know what the final answer will turn out to be when future generations finally solve the hard problem of consciousness. But perhaps we might be seeing dreams as an overly passive and natural phenomenon instead of interpreting it as a real external force on our conscious awareness which could contribute to free will.


“Ancient thinkers, from Aristotle in the West to Brahmagupta in the East, had theorised that objects were attracted to the earth because it was in their nature to do so. Newton ignored this non-explanation, and applied the laws of motion to the motion of planets.”
www.newslaundry
Michael McMahon
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

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Belindi wrote: December 30th, 2020, 6:24 am Deep sleep and dreaming result from separate , almost all-or-nothing, ebbs and flows of neurochemicals.
Our brain and body “knows” our consciousness since the time when we first became achieved self-awareness as young children. Therefore over such a long period of time it must have some capacity to predict what our minds would do in certain situation and proceed to do it reflexively. It wouldn’t need real-time feedback and we’d mistakenly attribute the action to ourselves because it’s what we’d habitually do anyway. So dreams would be like a test of our subconscious reflexes. During the day some of our actions and thoughts could be somewhat automated even though the automation would be just out of our own convenience. It’d be like our subconscious minds could predict our free decisions for us ahead of time. Dreams would be our subconscious mind’s way for getting consent for some of our reflexes during the day. Therefore we’d still be indirectly free even if we didn’t choose a certain action ourselves; we’d just go along with it and we wouldn’t prevent it by using our free won’t.

consent: “permission for something to happen or agreement to do something.”
(Even if the deterministic subconscious makes many of our decisions, it only does so after repeated instances of our granting of permission for a particular response over a long span of time.)
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

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Belindi wrote: December 30th, 2020, 6:24 am "Veto power" is function of conscious awareness which is mediated by neurochemicals.
The manner in which consciousness is turned off when we fall asleep and turned back on as we awaken is subjectively equivalent to having jumped into your own future. It’s as though the past few hours during sleep never happened simply because we can’t remember any of it.
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

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Overwrite: “ a. To destroy or lose (old data) by recording new data over it. b. To record (new data) on top of already stored data, thus destroying the old data.”

Is it possible that our short-term memory within the dream itself is being constantly overwritten such that we lose self-awareness and forget the previous dream events? There’s a limit to how much the mind can multitask so maybe the dream is overwhelming the mind’s ability to focus on any one particular task whereby we’re forced to zone out. This overflowing multitask process could feasibly unearth new creative solutions.

“What is it that makes multitasking such a productivity killer? It might seem like you are accomplishing multiple things at the same time, but what you are really doing is quickly shifting your attention and focus from one thing to the next. Switching from one task to another makes it difficult to tune out distractions and can cause mental blocks that can slow you down.”
- verywellmind
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

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If the encryption procedure is social contact , this could be the truth.

My personal view could be expressed in the following wikipedia excerpt:

This was revised in 1983 by Crick and Mitchison's "reverse learning" theory, which states that dreams are like the cleaning-up operations of computers when they are offline, removing (suppressing) parasitic nodes and other "junk" from the mind during sleep.[85][86] However, the opposite view that dreaming has an information handling, memory-consolidating function (Hennevin and Leconte, 1971) is also common.

Other opinions are :

Eugen Tarnow suggests that dreams are ever-present excitations of long-term memory, even during waking life. The strangeness of dreams is due to the format of long-term memory, reminiscent of Penfield & Rasmussen's findings that electrical excitations of the cortex give rise to experiences similar to dreams. During waking life an executive function interprets long-term memory consistent with reality checking. Tarnow's theory is a reworking of Freud's theory of dreams in which Freud's unconscious is replaced with the long-term memory system and Freud's "Dream Work" describes the structure of long-term memory.
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

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My personal view is that dreams aren’t only imaginative simulations but also deterministic counterfactual predictions. If everything and everyone were physically deterministic, then a simulated alteration in a variable in your past would mean that all the hypothetical events that followed suit in this alternate timeline could also be completely determined. So if our thoughts about a real previous situation were rearranged in a dream then all of our subsequent actions in a dream would be a natural continuation from this first change. Therefore in a sense a dream is just an attempted prediction of what you’d have done if a circumstance in the past was altered. The dream would be an investigation of how you’d have gone about resolving the new problems that would have arisen had you done things differently in your past.
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

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“Jitter, in networking, refers to small intermittent delays during data transfers... Technically, jitter is the variation in latency — the delay between when a signal is transmitted and when it is received.”
https://www.google.ie/amp/s/techterms.c ... ion/jitter

The mind-body problem is an enduring mystery. What would happen if we bluntly viewed the sleep-wake cycle as being reversed? As a point of reference, we’d be mentally waking up as our physical body does the opposite by going to sleep and we’d sentiently zone out as our body gets out of bed in the morning. Our conscious minds would then have to be projected into the future in order to correspond and keep up with the actions of our body. Dreams in this case would function as jitter where our mind receives delayed retrospective signals from the body. The consequence of this would be that the minds of other people would be physically located in the past relative to their brain and we wouldn’t communicate with other minds in real-time. The brain would be somehow relaying signals to a mental temporality which is situated in the past when people were asleep. So the waking present moment would actually be physical in nature and devoid of immediate consciousness. Consciousness would have other indirect ways to trickle down information and affect the physical world. However I’m uncertain of this analogy.
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