Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

[Michael McMahon]

The overall ambience of a room in a false awakening might resemble a cartoon. Here I'm referring to the impression of the colours and antique doors rather the personified cutlery!

[Michael McMahon]

Viewing the unconscious mind as being omniscient might lead to delusions but deluding yourself is part and parcel of dreaming! Your unconscious is all-knowing over you by virtue of being you!

[Sculptor1]

Hi, my name is Michael McMahon. I'm just wondering in terms of physics could dreaming be an encryption procedure and in terms of philosophy if lucid dreaming has any relevance. Encryption isn't used only to secure information but also to delete information. I think sleep is thoroughly misunderstood. I think that it's the acausality of sleep that is the source of free will.

I read a few interesting articles. One is about open timelike curves (https://phys.org/news/2015-12-computing ... ravel.html). These are where an observer goes backwards in their memory but encrypts the information such that the observers are non-interacting but for an entangled gravitational time-dilation.

Another article was about how entropy defying messages could be compatible with quantum mechanics so long as again the information is deleted. This is according to Lorenzo Maccone (https://physics.aps.org/story/v24/st7).

Lucid dreaming is where through intense focus you become conscious during sleep. When you consider major problems like scepticism (dreams are deceptions), why is there something rather than nothing (during sleep there appears to be nothing) and free will (dreams are super-determined in the sense that your thoughts are controlled to prevent you becoming conscious), they all get subliminally solved during sleep, so your unconscious mind knows the answer to these problems. Also consider the notorious binding problem of how the brain creates a unity of consciousness from disparate neurons. The only time all the neurons in the brain are in sync is during slow wave sleep so maybe that has something to do with it.

Just to preempt criticism, if people don't have free will like hard determinists believe then you're in the uncanny valley (creepy mannequins and people in masks; check out https://spectrum.ieee.org/what-is-the-uncanny-valley). And I think free will agnostics are a bit lazy. Yes it's a 5,000-year-old problem so we won't solve it in a day. But if you don't try you're guaranteed to not make any progress!

Thanks for your amusing strawman in the last paragraph.
I always love this one.
So where does your will come from?

[Sculptor1]

Viewing the unconscious mind as being omniscient might lead to delusions but deluding yourself is part and parcel of dreaming! Your unconscious is all-knowing over you by virtue of being you!

And what makes the you, you?

[Pattern-chaser]

Therefore our unconscious minds might appear to know more about ourselves than we do.

There is a part of your mind, of you, that we call your "unconscious mind". You write as though it is some kind of parasite, not an intimate part of your personal whole?

[Michael McMahon]

Therefore our unconscious minds might appear to know more about ourselves than we do.

There is a part of your mind, of you, that we call your "unconscious mind". You write as though it is some kind of parasite, not an intimate part of your personal whole?

I think the relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind is symbiotic and synergystic. The unconscious has more information than my conscious mind but it's encrypted and indirect. My conscious mind has one general memory system whereas my unconscious mind can continuously reorder my memory into a larger though often irrational probability space.


"Synergy: a mutually advantageous conjunction or compatibility of distinct business participants or elements (such as resources or efforts)

Symbiosis: a cooperative relationship (as between two persons or groups)

Parasitism: Parasitism is a relationship between species, where one organism, the parasite, lives on another organism, the host, causing it some harm, and is adapted structurally to this way of life."
-Linkedin

[Michael McMahon]

And what makes the you, you?

Perhaps I could define myself by what I am not. The unconscious minds of others are inaccessible to me. Everyone's temporal experience of life is unique where as physical objects can be duplicated.

[Michael McMahon]

So where does your will come from?

Let's imagine that both eternalism and temporal subjectivism were true. So all of time in the collective god-like perspective of the universe existed primordially. Then your timeline would be like the removal/complement of everybody else's consciousness from the universe.

Complement: "the members of a set or class that are not members of a given subset."

[Sculptor1]

And what makes the you, you?

Perhaps I could define myself by what I am not. The unconscious minds of others are inaccessible to me. Everyone's temporal experience of life is unique where as physical objects can be duplicated.

NO you cannot define yourself by what you are not.
That does not help in any sense.
I am not a banana, does not help.

[Sculptor1]

So where does your will come from?

Let's imagine that both eternalism and temporal subjectivism were true. So all of time in the collective god-like perspective of the universe existed primordially. Then your timeline would be like the removal/complement of everybody else's consciousness from the universe.

Complement: "the members of a set or class that are not members of a given subset."

So where does your will come from?

How do you make a choice?

[Michael McMahon]

I am not a banana, does not help.

I don't know what I can say so I'll look to some vivid dreams I had the other night! The first odd experience was where my dream character was trying to fall asleep in his bed but felt breathless and my real self woke up. Later in the night my dreaming self was looking over a history book. The way the pictures swapped from Ancient Greece to some other places made it feel like I was reinarnating instantly after each battle. Closer to the morning I was with a friend and guiding her to a city park. I was on the footpath while she was on a motorbike and I signalled to her with my arm to take a certain turn. I followed her along afterwards but once I reached a bridge I noticed it had a sudden drop. It only extended a quarter of the way to the other side. I couldn't see below the drop because I was balanced precariously. I concluded she must have died and felt grief. I was confused and couldn't see any warning signs on the road. As I walked back further I noticed a foreign language sign but wasn't sure what it meant. I awoke briefly and during my final stretch of sleep I experienced a continuation of the previous dream. I was wandering back to my apartment and I noticed some teenagers outside. I was suspicious of them and tried to lock the doors. However I couldn't figure out the twisting motion on the door handles. I saw them approaching and tried to retreat. I hit one of them on the staircase but I was in fear at the endless stream of thieves entering inside. Despite the fact that my dream character was miraculously fending the first few off I came to realise that the more I defend myself the greater their revenge will be. I froze and let them pass and expected the worse before waking up and embracing the day!

[Michael McMahon]

NO you cannot define yourself by what you are not.
That does not help in any sense.

The way the dream character thought that he was reincarnating as another soldier as if he were respawning in a Call-of-Duty multiplayer free-for-all made me think about the doctrine of reincarnation itself. One reason I worry about the prospect of becoming someone else after death is the sheer exhaustion at having to start back at square 1 with another childhood. I'd a happy childhood but now I'm simply more more accustomed to the luxuries of adulthood. Yet the thought of reincarnating as another adult with ready-made thoughts of their own creeps me out a small bit. I know that other species like bears have a shorter childhood period than humans but I'd really need to identify with the human being I'd be reincarnating "into". If we continued the time travel analogy into daily life then perhaps we could say that very young children are experiencing time at a fraction of a second faster than adults due to a lack of memories and experience. We don't know as an adult exactly what it felt like when we were a toddler due to childhood amnesia. Maybe the notion of "gliding" through time into your next life might minimise the fear of reincarnation.

[Michael McMahon]

So where does your will come from?

How do you make a choice?

Every dream is different in the same way that every person is different. Talking with someone would be like were interacting with a totally different dream!

Their outlandish, spiritual costumes create an absurdist vibe that reflects the strangeness of free will. I'm so used to being me that I can overlook my own weirdness. How we want to present ourselves to the world affects our free will:

Empire Of The Sun - Walking On A Dream

It's paradoxical that songs with silly romantic themes can sometimes produce the most spiritual and humble musical tones. The beat of a song is like a person's unique disposition:

Livin' Joy - Dreamer

[Michael McMahon]

(like we were interacting with a totally...)

[Sculptor1]

I am not a banana, does not help.

I don't know what I can say so I'll look to some vivid dreams I had the other night! The first odd experience was where my dream character was trying to fall asleep in his bed but felt breathless and my real self woke up. Later in the night my dreaming self was looking over a history book. The way the pictures swapped from Ancient Greece to some other places made it feel like I was reinarnating instantly after each battle. Closer to the morning I was with a friend and guiding her to a city park. I was on the footpath while she was on a motorbike and I signalled to her with my arm to take a certain turn. I followed her along afterwards but once I reached a bridge I noticed it had a sudden drop. It only extended a quarter of the way to the other side. I couldn't see below the drop because I was balanced precariously. I concluded she must have died and felt grief. I was confused and couldn't see any warning signs on the road. As I walked back further I noticed a foreign language sign but wasn't sure what it meant. I awoke briefly and during my final stretch of sleep I experienced a continuation of the previous dream. I was wandering back to my apartment and I noticed some teenagers outside. I was suspicious of them and tried to lock the doors. However I couldn't figure out the twisting motion on the door handles. I saw them approaching and tried to retreat. I hit one of them on the staircase but I was in fear at the endless stream of thieves entering inside. Despite the fact that my dream character was miraculously fending the first few off I came to realise that the more I defend myself the greater their revenge will be. I froze and let them pass and expected the worse before waking up and embracing the day!

It's a dream, yes?
Anything can happen in a dream. They are not code with secret meanings.
I see them more as mental clean-up.