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?

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In that example the function of consciousness would be to merely remember your emotions during the day until it’s updated during sleep.
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

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It’s like our consciousness is free while our body is deterministic. Somehow our free thoughts need to get reduced back to deterministic logic. In other words our brain has to work backwards to find out what sequence of deterministic events would of led to you making that free decision. As you can imagine there’d be a lot of redundancy in that process. So maybe one of technically analysing dreams would be like if they were a reverse version of a rube goldberg machine. They’d start off with the end result and devise these contraptions to get back to a deterministic sequence of events.

“A Rube Goldberg machine, named after American cartoonist Rube Goldberg, is a chain reaction-type machine or contraption intentionally designed to perform a simple task in an indirect and overly complicated way. Usually, these machines consist of a series of simple unrelated devices; the action of each triggers the initiation of the next, eventually resulting in achieving a stated goal.”
Michael McMahon
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

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https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TxRnzLv5HOE
“Whatever the neurological precursors are of the veto, those too are being kindled and made effective by processes which no one is conscious of... It’s not just that there’s a time difference... even if we were conscious at this first instant of this plan arising in the brain or this veto arising in the brain; its mere arising is also inscrutable.”

We’d be marginally aware of our veto power if dreams were a manifestation of that free won’t. So we’d possess some control over our veto mechanism even though the amnesia of sleep means we’d forget a lot of those instructions which we had given to the unconscious.
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

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The more vivid and lucid the dream, the more ability we have to instruct the subconscious on what our desires and intentions ought to be.
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

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By not engaging in a dream then a new dream will spontaneously arise. Likewise we can act on new thoughts by procrastinating on our previous thoughts. There are elements of free won’t in both dreams and the waking state.
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

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The imagery in a poem can appear disjointed at first glance. Yet we begin to appreciate the descriptive scenes through its connection by rhyme and metaphor. Likewise in dreams we are trying to rhyme our emotions with visual metaphors.
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

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Lots of my behaviour could be automated by a robot. A robot could talk as I do and visually distinguish objects using computation. Lots of the natural world does not have free will because its not conscious. A river has complex meanders and flows chaotically yet its not free in the same sense that we are. Fundamentally, physical objects don’t sleep or dream. Standby on a computer is analogous to us having our eyelids shut: we are ready to open our eyelids if necessary and our thoughts are relaxed even though we’re not asleep. To be asleep means you were once conscious and the both mental states are intertwined.
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

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Image

Prehistoric societies lived for thousands of years under contrasting mystical and shamanic beliefs systems. Given the sheer timescales involved, is it possible to 100% eradicate their metaphysical interpretations? Could vestiges of self-awareness trickle down to future generations? For example religion is dwindling in a few secular countries and yet some of their core metaphysical beliefs like humility and charity remain in the collective psyche even though they’re often interpreted through a different lens. Maybe thousands of years of wonder and awe have left an infinitesimal imprint on our neurological tendencies to view ourselves as free agents.
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

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“Retrocausality, or backwards causation, is a concept of cause and effect in which an effect precedes its cause in time and so a later event affects an earlier one.”

Can the intended ending of a dream affect the beginning of that dream? If dreams are mostly deterministic then the start and finishing narrative of a dream are connected.
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

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Free will is individualistic: my free will is different than your free will. I make a decision for different reasons than you do. Our free wills doesn’t always overlap and there’s many people and strangers we don’t know or understand. Hence our free will is private to each of us. This is comparable to the subjectivity of dreams. There isn’t necessarily a shared feature for free will as there is for other common forces like electromagnetism. This is like the way my consciousness is tied to my brain alone and can’t be retuned to another person’s brain. If we’re both short-sighted we can swap our electromagnetic glasses but not our conscious brains!
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

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Lucid dreaming might occasionally result in sleep-deprivation if we’re not fully unconscious. Lucid dreaming can be mentally insightful but physically tiring.
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

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A dream seems to last a few seconds but “dilates” time enough such that an hour may have passed when we awaken after its over.
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

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Our unconscious encrypts memories according to my analogy. Some of the dream narrative is predetermined and our dream character’s responses are often involuntary. Our dreams aren’t fully decrypted afterwards. We can try to make sense of the bits we remember. This means some of the information we have is derived is derived from a physical system and simulation that no longer exists. Although the sequences which are forgotten and remain encrypted creates a feeling of mystery about our sense of being and personal history. Therefore we don’t always know where our thoughts and intuitions come from. We don’t possess 100% self-awareness about our intentions. This discrepancy adds to our uncertainty and sense of free will. This can be compared to the notion of a one-time pad where the encryption is unique and untraceable because the cipher is hidden afterwards.
Michael McMahon
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

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If the process of free will occurred during sleep, then it’d be as if other people’s timelines had already elapsed and were in the past relative to your consciousness. This would mean their brain is physical and their mental sphere is communicated indirectly rather than in real time.
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

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“A closed timelike curve (CTC) is a world line in a Lorentzian manifold, of a material particle in spacetime that is "closed", returning to its starting point... If CTCs exist, their existence would seem to imply at least the theoretical possibility of time travel backwards in time, raising the spectre of the grandfather paradox, although the Novikov self-consistency principle seems to show that such paradoxes could be avoided.”

Someone could view our time during the day as constant. It’s like we have 16 hours each day and restart at the same location in time. This might resemble a rewinding of time during sleep to return to the beginning again and refresh our timeline and memory.
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