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 »

detail wrote: January 4th, 2021, 1:25 pm 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.
“Emotional intelligence refers to the ability to identify and manage one’s own emotions, as well as the emotions of others.
Emotional intelligence is generally said to include at least three skills: emotional awareness, or the ability to identify and name one’s own emotions; the ability to harness those emotions and apply them to tasks like thinking and problem solving; and the ability to manage emotions, which includes both regulating one’s own emotions when necessary and helping others to do the same.”
Psychology Today

Anger for example is a very blunt emotion. It tells us that something is wrong. It could be that someone is antagonising us or that we are frustrated by having failed at a particular task. So while anger is useful at alerting us to the problem and motivating us to solve it, it doesn’t actually tell us how to go about resolving the dilemma. Anger could easily backfire by forcing us to overreact to a problem or perhaps by blaming the wrong factors. It’s difficult to consciously tame our ability to control anger as it’s such an intense emotion. But while we’re asleep we can get away with mishandling anger and rage because dreams aren’t reality. So dreams are a prime opportunity for us to hone and refine our emotional awareness on our sensations of anger and happiness. With enough emotional intelligence we can be more attuned to what specifically the anger is telling us and to restrain the anger to a proportionate extent. We could be better able to analyse our anger in the heat of the moment. Necessity is the mother of invention so in a dream we are compelled to find new ways to solve our emotional feelings and experiences. Emotional intelligence tends to increase with age. Anger is just one example of our many emotions that sleep could be improving. The weirdness of dreams can arouse our curiosity and makes us engage with their unusual plots and subplots. In a dream we are continuously being derailed by the subplots such that many dreams don’t have a definite conclusion. The denouement of the dreams occurs only after we awaken when we reflect on their subjective meaning and importance.

Subplot: a part of the story of a book or play that develops separately from the main story.
Denouement: the final part of a play, film, or narrative in which the strands of the plot are drawn together and matters are explained or resolved.

“A part of the brain called the amygdala is responsible for triggering strong emotions such and anger and rage, and is linked to our fight or flight response. Walker describes a sleep study in which two groups were shown images that ranged from neutral in content (a basket, a piece of driftwood) to negative in content (a burning house, a venomous snake) to a group of individuals who stayed up all night and another group who got a full night of sleep. It turns out, the sleep deprived individuals showed well over a 60% increase in emotional reactivity in the amygdala. The well rested group showed only a modest degree of reactivity.
Without adequate sleep, we produce inappropriate emotional reactions and are unable to put things and situations in the appropriate contexts.”
https://www.keystepmedia.com/sleep-brain-kivel/
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NickGaspar
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

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Michael McMahon wrote: April 3rd, 2018, 9:37 am 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 http://www.the13thfloor.tv/2016/04/12/i ... e-android/). 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!
Try reading Marks Solms's work on dreams. He is the discoverer of the brain mechanism of dreams and the founder of the field of Neuropsychoanalysis.
All types of philosophical discussions (in order to avoid being pseudo philosophical) need to take in to account our Epistemology and current Science.
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

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NickGaspar wrote: January 27th, 2021, 11:28 am Try reading Marks Solms's work on dreams. He is the discoverer of the brain mechanism of dreams and the founder of the field of Neuropsychoanalysis.
All types of philosophical discussions (in order to avoid being pseudo philosophical) need to take in to account our Epistemology and current Science.
“Mark Solms is a professor of neuropsychology at the University of Cape Town, who originally trained as a neuroscientist but began studying dreams after later training as a psychoanalyst. "You see things in dreams because your visual cortex is excited. You hear things because auditory cortex is excited," he says. "The forebrain connects all the images together in a futile attempt to make a story or an episode out of what's happening. The narrative doesn't mean anything."

Hobson's "activation synthesis theory" remained the accepted explanation for how dreams are generated and Freud's ideas were discounted by mainstream scientists. That is until Solms made the chance discovery that people with lesions on their pons were still having dreams.
"I was taken aback - we know that damage to this structure leads to a loss of Rem sleep and therefore it must lead to a loss of dreaming," recalls Solms. He had disassociated Rem sleep from dreams but it left the question wide open once more: what part of the brain was causing dreams?
The answer came as another surprise. "There were brain structures which, when damaged, led to a cessation of dreaming," explains Solms. One was the part of the brain that processes spatial cognition. But more interesting was the fact that dreaming also stopped with damage to a part of the brain that controlled motivation.

Patients who have suffered damage to this part of the brain - the ventromesial quadrant of the frontal lobe - not only lose their ability to dream, but have a complete lack of motivation to do anything. "Patients basically do nothing of their own volition," says Solms. "They can perform any action no matter how complex so long as you instruct them to do it. They don't have an internal drive to do anything."

The research showed that dreams were not controlled by the basic automatic mechanisms as had been thought.”
- theguardian


It seems to me that our motivation to do a task is quite similar to using our free will to do the task. This is because if we’re not motivated to do something then we wouldn’t use our free will to do it. Motivation is like an incentive: if we accomplish a task that we had set out to do then we would feel a rewarding sensation of satisfaction. Free will is a general term for our overall personality and lifelong intentions while motivation appears to refer more to a particular instance of free will on a specific task or goal.

So if I raise my hand, am I using my free will to do it? One way I was thinking about the problem is that our thoughts could be perceived like a radio conversation that the body is able to tune in to and is occasionally listening in on. The mechanical body tends to do what it hears us telling it to do but it could ignore our instructions as well and do nothing. When it does nothing then that’d be like “free won’t”.

We sleep because we feel sleepy and drowsy. But saying that we need to sleep to avoid feeling tired and fatigued seems a bit circular. Are there any other symptoms of sleep deprivation? If we were able to be sleep deprived without experiencing the heavy sensation of tiredness, how would we feel? Our thoughts might get a bit slower, our memory is weaker and we lose some of our spontaneity and initiative. If we stay up all night then we are less able to concentrate in the morning. We can become more alert to the hectic nature of our surroundings when we’re sleep deprived. By losing some of our own focus then in sharp contrast to ourselves we’d become more attuned to the randomness and creativity of our external environment, the unfamiliarity of strangers passing by on the street and the buzzing intentionality of others. In other words we are less responsive and almost lose just a small amount of our free will when we are lacking sleep.
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

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Random definition: “ 1: governed by or involving equal chances for each item. 2: odd, unusual, or unexpected.”

At first glance randomness and determinism appear to be opposites. Randomness seems to be unpredictable while determinism is predictable. Yet in a certain sense I think dreams are both random and deterministic. Dreams are random in the sense of the second definition by being bizarre. Although none of the people you meet in a dream have free will. Your unconscious mind knows what will happen in each scene and it’s not surprised by the strange sequence of events. So the events in a dream progresses along in a deterministic fashion even though its initial starting point is somewhat random.
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

Post by Michael McMahon »

Another way to think about it is that even if our intentionality is currently deterministic, then every morning after sleep we’ve acquired a thoroughly altered, new and updated deterministic will. We’d only be deterministic until we go back to sleep.
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detail
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

Post by detail »

Michael McMahon wrote: January 25th, 2021, 11:18 am
detail wrote: January 4th, 2021, 1:25 pm 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.
“Emotional intelligence refers to the ability to identify and manage one’s own emotions, as well as the emotions of others.
Emotional intelligence is generally said to include at least three skills: emotional awareness, or the ability to identify and name one’s own emotions; the ability to harness those emotions and apply them to tasks like thinking and problem solving; and the ability to manage emotions, which includes both regulating one’s own emotions when necessary and helping others to do the same.”
Psychology Today

Anger for example is a very blunt emotion. It tells us that something is wrong. It could be that someone is antagonising us or that we are frustrated by having failed at a particular task. So while anger is useful at alerting us to the problem and motivating us to solve it, it doesn’t actually tell us how to go about resolving the dilemma. Anger could easily backfire by forcing us to overreact to a problem or perhaps by blaming the wrong factors. It’s difficult to consciously tame our ability to control anger as it’s such an intense emotion. But while we’re asleep we can get away with mishandling anger and rage because dreams aren’t reality. So dreams are a prime opportunity for us to hone and refine our emotional awareness on our sensations of anger and happiness. With enough emotional intelligence we can be more attuned to what specifically the anger is telling us and to restrain the anger to a proportionate extent. We could be better able to analyse our anger in the heat of the moment. Necessity is the mother of invention so in a dream we are compelled to find new ways to solve our emotional feelings and experiences. Emotional intelligence tends to increase with age. Anger is just one example of our many emotions that sleep could be improving. The weirdness of dreams can arouse our curiosity and makes us engage with their unusual plots and subplots. In a dream we are continuously being derailed by the subplots such that many dreams don’t have a definite conclusion. The denouement of the dreams occurs only after we awaken when we reflect on their subjective meaning and importance.

Subplot: a part of the story of a book or play that develops separately from the main story.
Denouement: the final part of a play, film, or narrative in which the strands of the plot are drawn together and matters are explained or resolved.

“A part of the brain called the amygdala is responsible for triggering strong emotions such and anger and rage, and is linked to our fight or flight response. Walker describes a sleep study in which two groups were shown images that ranged from neutral in content (a basket, a piece of driftwood) to negative in content (a burning house, a venomous snake) to a group of individuals who stayed up all night and another group who got a full night of sleep. It turns out, the sleep deprived individuals showed well over a 60% increase in emotional reactivity in the amygdala. The well rested group showed only a modest degree of reactivity.
Without adequate sleep, we produce inappropriate emotional reactions and are unable to put things and situations in the appropriate contexts.”
https://www.keystepmedia.com/sleep-brain-kivel/
Emotions are usually something connected to the social contact and the intelligent treatment of others due to ontological communication. Dreams do not communicate with others, but just just provide either a data analysis of already happened facts or just a removal of superflous data. Dreams just happen in your own head and just compile perhaps social data in your mind in order to analyze your behaviour. An over emphasizing of the role of dreams in your conscience of social intelligence is distortion of the reality and surely an inaccurate ansatz to treat the analysis of a sensitive human mind.
Michael McMahon
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

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A computer spreadsheet can provide a data analysis and remove wasteful data almost immediately. So while those are two interesting functions for sleep, I think the fact that sleep requires up to 8 hours to perform properly means that whatever it’s doing must be an extremely delicate operation.
Michael McMahon
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

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detail wrote: February 6th, 2021, 1:36 pm An over emphasizing of the role of dreams in your conscience of social intelligence is distortion of the reality and surely an inaccurate ansatz to treat the analysis of a sensitive human mind.
We can’t feel our eyes during sleep. We can’t see other people’s REM sleep because their eyelids are closed. As people drift into sleep their eyes might be partially open. But just imagine if we walked into a hotel lobby where a few people were asleep on the sofa with their eyelids wide open and in a state of REM sleep. That would be a very strange sight which would viscerally emphasise the mystery of dreams and consciousness. The way the eyes are moving in opposite directions at lightning speeds would make us ponder their state of consciousness. We already know about the peculiar eye movement since it’s discovery in 1953 though we aren’t always immediately aware of it. It’s largely hidden from sight.
Michael McMahon
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

Post by Michael McMahon »

Atreyu wrote: April 29th, 2018, 3:42 pm The OP did not do a good job describing exactly what he means by 'encryption' in the context in which he's proposing it.

Perhaps he could clarify it...
I think our memory of the order of events in our past is encrypted in a dream. So I think it might be more than a semantic reinterpretation of our past thoughts; it could even be a temporal rearrangement of our memory of different times in our past. So a subjective memory of a period of time is being amalgamated with another unrelated event such that they elapse together in a dream. This strange sequence of events compels the dream character to come up with unusual explanations to account for the logical discrepancies. A dream is more intense than a daydream. There’s an overlap in the colours of the dream with the colours we see when we wake up. It’s as if dreams have a pseudo-existence in our waking memory during the day. This subjective acausality might help with our sensation of free will.
Michael McMahon
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

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Another way to view dreams as having deterministic elements is that they can occur naturally without having to expend any effort or mental energy and still manage to give rise to nuanced complicated stories. From my own subjective experience of lucid dreaming I realised that it’s possible to have vivid dreams and achieve a state of self-aware consciousness in a dream though often without being able to control much of the content of what your witnessing or thinking about. Everything can appear jumbled up and peculiar where you’re a passive observer of the unfolding chaos in front of you. However I feel that I’ve some capacity to escape the dream by altering my concentration and then try to wake up or get swept into another dream and experience a false awakening.
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

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A dream is 2-dimensional in the sense that there’s no objective, physical depth between the dreamer and any imaginary dream object.
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

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“In general, we are very good at forgetting nonessentials. In fact, many of our thoughts, not just those we have while dreaming, are lost. We tend to recall only things that we think about often or that have emotional significance—a problem, a date, a meeting. Mulling over important thoughts activates our dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), a brain region that facilitates memory.
Although most dreams vanish, certain ones tend to remain. These dreams were so beautiful or bizarre, they captured our attention and increased activity in our DLPFC. Thus, the more impressive your dream or thought, the more likely you are to remember it.”
- scientificamerican

I’d posted before about dreaming to ignore information in terms of cryptographic erasure and also the artificial intelligence problem called the frame problem. I was thinking that another way to approach it would be that dreaming can be one’s way of simply practicing our ability to forget simulated information. That would mean that we don’t literally or permanently have to erase past memories in our sleep. Dreaming could simply be a way to improve our active ability to forget information during the next day so we can concentrate on more relevant information.
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

Post by Michael McMahon »

We might be utilising some of our free won’t in the way we move from one dream to the next. If we like the dream we can try to prolong it by remaining in it for as long as we can. We can express our dislike of a dream by escaping it and ending it prematurely so that we can then start a new dream.
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

Post by Michael McMahon »

Namelesss wrote: April 3rd, 2018, 11:15 pm Becoming lucid in your night dream is far easier than becoming lucid in this dream!
Night dreams flow into each other in a causal way. The contents of one dream keep changing until it slowly resembles a new dream with a different theme. So if waking reality is itself a sort of dream, then last night’s dreams can keep flowing into our waking thoughts and perhaps affect our behaviour.
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Re: Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

Post by Michael McMahon »

We have a very limited memory of emotions even though we can remember the situation. For instance we can’t fully recall the pleasant taste of chocolate or the sore pain of a cough. What I’m trying to say is that later on we can only partially remember the sensation. Otherwise we’d be in constant bliss thinking about the taste of sweets. Yet when we sleep we seem to re-experience the sensation when we remember it. Thus the happier we feel during the event the happier the memory during sleep. So our emotional memory could affect our free will during sleep even in the event the emotions weren’t completely causal when we’re awake.
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