Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

[Michael McMahon]

In dreams we experience a variable rate of time through differences in how vivid and conscious we are.

[Michael McMahon]

Our free will seems to instinctively increase when we grow from children to adults. So a philosophical description of free will would have to account for how adults have greater freedom than children in terms of decision-making, self-control, casualness and self-awareness. For instance if free will is simply innate to the human soul then young children and infants should neurologically have an equivalent or even greater amount of free will than adults. Indeed adults have more experience and wisdom than children but it subjectively feels like the relative increase in free will is beyond the knowledge acquired from mere education alone. From this logic there'd have to be additional mechanisms to increase free will.

[Michael McMahon]

Last night I'd a dream with a simple rationalisation: I was at a relatives house and the rooms looked different so I reasoned they rented out many of the bedrooms to others.

[Michael McMahon]

When we learn information it's often not just stored in memory for future recall but it's also assimilated with the rest of our memory so that it becomes reflexive in our intuition. This is one reason why native children will grow to have better fluency than foreign adult learners of a language despite less intentional learning in class. That is to say every word in their vocabulary is interrelated with the rest of their knowledge and they don't have to translate thoughts in their mind from one language to another before speaking and writing. Maybe sleep can improve our mental reflexes and verbal concision when we think to ourselves.

"This characteristic allows reflex actions to occur relatively quickly by activating spinal motor neurons without the delay of routing signals through the brain, although the brain will receive sensory input while the reflex action occurs."
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/bound ... /reflexes/
Our subconscious can automatically process much information and let our conscious minds know afterwards.

[Michael McMahon]

PS lost link on page 11 post number 6 "...the feedback loop of an immediate mission versus overall objectives."
Saving Private Ryan Clip 1.avi
[yid]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kTiu7AxWvc[/yid]

transcript:
oh looks like we got something in that
sandbag bunker right under the station
see it yeah it's my good stuff
what is it machine gun probably mg-42
[ __ ] is that what got those guys i need
one of them's on board
no their patches are 80 seconds so your
luck's not that good
yeah i don't know how fast the rest of
your betties are and i'm thinking we
detoured this way quick and quiet the
crowds will never even know we were here
so captain what i'm trying to say is why
don't we just go around the thing
i hear what you're saying really can't
go around it
i'm with robin on this one sir i mean we
left them 88.
for the air force the air forces are
going to spin ordnance on one machine
gun
uh captain
we can still skip it and accomplish our
mission i mean this isn't our mission
right sir
well that's what you want to do you just
want to leave it here so they can ambush
the next company that comes along
no sir that's not what i'm saying i'm
simply saying it seems like an
unnecessary risk
given our objective sir our objective is
to win the war
sir i just uh i'll have a good feeling
about this one
when was the last time you felt good
about anything
all right three three runners with
suppressing fire
mellish you hook to the right i'll go up
the middle
who's going left
who's going left
i'll do it i'll go left
all right help him switch off with
jackson
and you linger in the rear
we advance to keep pressure on him till
he has to change out his barrels
i think we should be able to hit him
from grenade range maybe i should go up
the middle sir
the way you run i don't think so maybe i
should go left sir
maybe you should shut up driving
base of fire
max eclipse we can reach them and extra
grenades for the base runners
so
so
get up here

[Michael McMahon]

Short-term memory of the past in a dream means we've also only a short-term planning ability for future dream events.

[Michael McMahon]

People have probably experienced lucid dreams throughout history. In shamanic cultures the waking trances may have resembled lucid dreams. The diversity of Native American tribes are as unique as each dream is. But as science did not yet exist they preferred to interpret these trances either mystically or religiously. For example they may have believed in spirits or nature Gods. The objective of science is not to reject subjective and peculiar phenomena but rather to tame it through a philosophical and analytical lens.

[Michael McMahon]

Dreaming entails both extremes: determinism and randomness. Even though they're polar opposites a dream can progress in a completely deterministic fashion but the catch is the starting point and initial plot are random. Dreams are deterministic randomness!

[Michael McMahon]

I think it's how we interpret that deterministic randomness when we wake up afterwards that helps us feel free.

[Michael McMahon]

Believing that God is the source of free will would seem to rely on free will being a miracle of what would have to be a highly interventionist type of God that constantly interacts with the world seeing as our feeling of free will is continuous.

[Michael McMahon]

Free will can be perceived religiously but I see no contradiction in an atheist being able to believe in free will. Materialism and atheism aren't necessarily synonyms.

[Michael McMahon]

Maybe he was trying to connect with the dark spirits of the dreamworld!:
[yid]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xt2qsqsXefY[/yid]
Ladytron - Seventeen (The Droyds Remix)

[Michael McMahon]

Interestingly lucid dreaming could be a cause, symptom and cure for mental illness. As paradoxical as that may sound, the difference is in how someone interprets and responds to these experiences.

"Similarities in brain activity during lucid dreaming and psychosis suggest that the previously discredited technique of dream therapy may be useful in psychiatric treatment, according to a European Science Foundation workgroup. People suffering from nightmares can sometimes be treated by training them to dream lucidly so they can consciously wake up."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 184831.htm

[Michael McMahon]

I was a bit sleep-deprived so I took a nap in the open sun. It was approaching midday and I could feel myself getting hotter but I was too tired to get up. In a dream I'd instantly ran inside to a building. When I opened my eyes the next time that reminded me to move quickly to the shade behind a tree and to drink some water. Therefore where my dream character felt like he was overheating it made me think to do the same and avoid heat fatigue. That's an example of one of my own dreams that resembled a threat detection.

[Michael McMahon]

A functional advantage of believing in free will is to help explain how there appears to be more information in the world than either pure determinism or total randomness could achieve on their own without reference to the other. Free will isn't a superstition seeing as it's always consistent with our internal perception. For example if our thoughts were inconsistent or somehow went off in a tangent without our control then that could dispel our belief in self-control or be used to imply we have a reduced version free will. I don't know everything about schizophrenia or patients who hear voices in their head but from a free will perspective I imagine one way to disprove the externality and objectivity of the voices or irrational thoughts would be to get it to contradict itself through mutually exclusive statements.