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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Rhys Griffin
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

Post by Rhys Griffin »

Thanks! I have spent much of my life fascinated by sleep and sleep research. As an active sleepwalker for forty-five years and as an occasional lucid dreamer, I would suggest that we need to see sleep as a multi-faceted phenomenon, not easily reducible to one function of feature. You wrote that "Encryption isn't used only to secure information but also to delete information." That's a fair description of brain function during sleep, but the brain does a great deal more, I would suggest that it engaged in constant revision, triage and affective processing. Revision blends storage with deletion.
I have also experienced dreams as eerie proposers for behavior, related to the notion that in sleep we can solve nettlesome problems. In one dream I remember I lived an entire scenario with a friend who had terminal cancer, When I awoke, I asked his wife if I could enact what the dream proposed. She eagerly agreed, so I did, and it worked out marvelously. What did my dreaming mind know that my waking mind did not?
Of course my mind goes to Hamlet: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." There are more things in dreams than philosophy knows, and there are more things in philosophy than we can dream. May the two dance together.
Michael McMahon
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

Post by Michael McMahon »

Rhys Griffin wrote: January 10th, 2022, 3:58 pm I would suggest that it engaged in constant revision, triage and affective processing. Revision blends storage with deletion.
True. Sometimes we're invincible in a dream and other times we might be hysterically afraid of little things in a nightmare. A dream can play an energetic sequence of events where our unconscious mind lacks stress or fear. Or else a nightmare can activate adrenaline such that we're unsettled by even the silliest of things. Therefore a dream can embolden us and alter our confidence levels. Vice versa if a dream reduces our confidence in a particular goal then we're more likely to prioritise a different goal. If we can overcome fear in a nightmare then we might have more luck in conquering the same emotions in real life even if it's triggered by unrelated sources. When it comes to threat simulation, the actual threat in a dream doesn't have to be realistic. A dream can hone our emotional responses to tense situations even by simulating irrelevant threats. That is to say we don't literally have to practice our self-defence skills for a specific threat we've encountered. A dream isn't only worried about our ability to detect and avoid a possible threat but rather to increase our capacity to handle fearful or negative emotions in general. In this way a dream can build up our resilience to disappointment or sadness even if the threatening stimulus in a dream doesn't materialise in real life.

"The threat simulation theory of dreaming (TST) () states that dream consciousness is essentially an ancient biological defence mechanism, evolutionarily selected for its capacity to repeatedly simulate threatening events. Threat simulation during dreaming rehearses the cognitive mechanisms required for efficient threat perception and threat avoidance, leading to increased probability of reproductive success during human evolution."
Michael McMahon
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

Post by Michael McMahon »

A gym can increase our pain tolerance for physical exercise even though a certain weightlifting manoeuvre might never be perfectly reflected in our daily lives. Likewise a nightmare could increase our fear threshold simply by activating the raw sensation of fear.

"Your pain tolerance refers to the maximum amount of pain you can handle. This is different from your pain threshold.
Your pain threshold is the minimum point at which something, such as pressure or heat, causes you pain."
https://www.healthline.com/health/high- ... -tolerance
Michael McMahon
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

Post by Michael McMahon »

Below is a similar link to the third one in the first post which later got broken. It's a humorous article with conspiracy theories about a singing mannequin. I mentioned it facetiously only to serve as a contrast for how we have consciousness while a machine doesn't.


"So where did this thing come from and what was the video supposed to mean if it even was supposed to mean anything? For a while the internet began forming theories, the most popular of which was that the creator of the android was actually a murderer. The reason for this theory came from some unsettling lines in the song she sings. Along with repeating how she feels fantastic, we feel fantastic, we are fantastic, etc., the middle of the song is where things take a turn and she starts singing, "Run, run, run, run... Please leave, please leave, please leave..." There is also a seemingly random shot where the camera zooms in on a wooded area and the robot's clothes even change briefly.

This led to the theory that the robot represented a woman its creator had killed due to her not meeting his standards of perfection (referencing the myth in the description), and he had then built the robot to replace her, dressing it in her clothes and doing his best to make it look like her. The lyrics were supposed to be the things he'd said to her right before her death, and that random shot of the woods? The rumor claimed that was where the body had been buried.

Another theory, also referencing the myth in the description, was that the robot had somehow become fully sentient and murdered its creator. A far less likely theory, but the internet loves its creepypastsas. Obviously, it's always best to pursue these sorts of theories with a healthy dose of skepticism, but that didn't stop people from wondering 'what if?' The answer, while still leaving some questions in its wake, was not nearly as menacing.

The robot's actual name is "Tara" and was created by a man named John Bergeron."
https://allthecreepylittlethings.blogspot.com/2019/04/
Michael McMahon
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

Post by Michael McMahon »

(It's the second article in the above link.)
Michael McMahon
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

Post by Michael McMahon »

If your real life events are as hectic as a dream then it should be easy to lucid dream. Then a dream would make as much sense as your ridiculous experiences in daily life! The nonsensical logic of dream will be more understandable to a naturally confused person!
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

Post by Michael McMahon »

On way to interpret a light morning dream is that we're 80% amnesiac and 20% conscious.
Michael McMahon
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

Post by Michael McMahon »

(One way)
Michael McMahon
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

Post by Michael McMahon »

Memory is synonymous with consciousness in a dream. If we can remember 10% of a dream then we tend to think that we were 10% conscious. If we can remember 90% of a dream then it'd seem like a lucid dream where we're 90% conscious and our dulled reaction speeds would account for the missing 10% of unconsciousness. Even in a lucid dream our thinking ability will be slightly dazed where we don't have 100% access to our rationality.
Michael McMahon
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

Post by Michael McMahon »

If you had amnesia where you had a memory span of 1 hour then you'd still feel the sentient flow of time. However if you're amnesia erased your memory after every single second then you'd be pretty much unconscious because you'd have no ability to track your experience.
Michael McMahon
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

Post by Michael McMahon »

"Rhetorical question: a question asked in order to create a dramatic effect or to make a point rather than to get an answer."

We nearly always think to ourselves in the form of statements or questions that comply with the semantics of our native language. A possible stream of thought might be as follows: "What will I do now? I'll go for a walk. I see the park up at the bottom of the street. When I reach the park I'll look for a bench to sit down. Actually I see a vending machine by the corner and I'll grab a bar of chocolate so that I'll have something to eat when I sit down." Notice that there's nothing too extraordinary about these sentences even though they were apparently influenced by the awe-inspiring force of free will. However it's not compulsory that I structure my mental musings in this linguistic form. I phrase it according to the rules of the English language simply because that's how I communicate with others and it'd be disorienting to have one accent when I speak to others and an altogether different voice in my own mind. I do have the capacity to speak to myself in the form of a personalised text-speak that only I could understand but this would be too distracting. For example I sometimes write notes to myself on a receipt in my wallet if I'm out walking and I write my thoughts down in case I forget. I don't bother writing full sentences but simply a few buzzwords that I can piece back together when I get home. There has been times where I forget and can't understand the meaning of the words if I've left it too long to get back to it. No one else could understand what I've written because I took shortcuts in my sentences and you'd have to know the thoughts that I had going through my head to make sense of it. Suffice it to say that it's possible to have alternative forms of phraseology if we were really motivated to think in terms of a particular metaphysical world-view. It'd be easier to glean the fluid nature of free will from an abstract point of view. For instance Shakespearean English not only had unusual words but also an uncanny sentence structure where pronouns and verbs were a small bit jumbled. Alternatively we could reinterpret some of our thoughts in the form of a rhetorical sentence. In this way any statement uttered in our imagination will inherently bring up more questions because the meaning of the first sentence is incomplete. I could half-heartedly tell myself: "It's boring. Now that I think about it the statement that I'm bored is true. Ok why don't I go for a walk? I won't refuse to do my previous intention. Wait; the chocolate that I see in the vending machine looks tasty. I'll get the chocolate? OK I will. Sit at the park bench? That's a good idea." Notice how this is merely a more elaborate and impersonal version of the stream of consciousness mentioned at the top of this paragraph. Asking yourself a rhetorical questions means you're free to go along with it or else to work backwards from the end result and find out why you'd disagree with it. I certainly don't spell out all of my intentions in a verbal format since we can use our intuition to fill in the gaps.


"Text-speak: a form of written language as used in text messages and other digital communications, characterized by many abbreviations and typically not following standard grammar, spelling, punctuation, and style."
Michael McMahon
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

Post by Michael McMahon »

One example of using your gut instinct is through comparative levels of excitement. The lack of excitement can itself be interpreted as an implied subconscious or emotional message to your thoughtful conscious mind. For example I went to a tennis tournament a few months ago full of optimism and unfortunately I lost my first match. Afterwards I altered my technique and practiced a lot more. I was thinking of travelling and re-entering a tournament but any time I went to do so I felt a bit passive and unexcited. I translated this ambivalence to mean my unconscious motor memory wasn't confident in my technique. I then decided to wait a few more weeks to train some more. As you can see I wasn't directly making an assessment about my tennis skills but rather I was indirectly perceiving fatigue to mean a degree of uncertainty about how much my technique had sunk into my memory. In other words I contrasted my neutral emotional state with the anticipation I had felt before my previous tournament. This is an example of dissociated reasoning where an excess of confidence is needed before acting on a decision.
Michael McMahon
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

Post by Michael McMahon »

A dream could activate a negative emotion in order to work backwards from that sensation. For example if your dream character felt frustrated then everything in your memory that made you stressed could be used to inform the dream's plot. In last night's dreams I thought about failed exams where my dream's persona went into a state of hyper-focus about its value for employment. In so many dreams I'm left wandering through old corridors and last night I was trying to find the exit onto a river below the building. There were so many dead ends that the hallways felt like a maze. I was trying to find a boat that I'd used earlier and when I reached the river banks I saw that it was partially submerged due to the rising river levels.
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

Post by Michael McMahon »

I was at the train station in a dream last night. Although for some reason it was just me and one other person travelling and we were on a two-seat train that resembled a roller-coster ride more than a train.
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

Post by Michael McMahon »

I was getting some kind of a chair lift to a jagged island in yesterday's non-lucid dream. I saw what appeared to be a stairway suspended in mid-air across the gorge but I noticed that it sometimes went vertically upwards and it even slanted upside-down or backwards in places. It looked too intimidating to climb and so I needed a chair lift with a rope tied to me in order to traverse it.
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