Dreams vs Reality

[@KaneB]

Arguments for physicalism: kzbin.info/www/bejne/nZ6cgGR7p7Z0g9E Concerns about the coherence of physicalism: kzbin.info/www/bejne/r2Grm6mEfdCbrpY I outline Ichikawa's imagination model of dreaming in these videos: kzbin.info/www/bejne/raa5p4d-iseLesk kzbin.info/www/bejne/larYqqh-hJJ7pdE

[@Bibibosh]

given china's population. and the gender ratio statically i have never woken up as a female. or a chinesee female.

[@jolssoni2499]

Someone please order some private tutoring from Kane so he can turn the heat back on :D

[@KaneB]

I don't mind just wearing more clothes when it's cold, so I probably wouldn't spend the money on heating anyway to be honest.

[@imcaspa1995]

@@KaneB A Socrates moves among us

[@RestIsPhilosophy]

Someone like him not having heating points to a failure in our economic system

[@ericvulgate]

I had a woman approach me in a lucid dream and tell me she was my handler, that she was an entity independent of my dream. She said she lived in Milwaukee. She asked me to tone down my excess, she said I was terrifying people with my behavior. It really stuck with me.

[@ganglandsublimity]

schizo shit fr

[@nonchalant-turtle]

I noticed that when I was in a particularly interesting lucid dream and was trying to continue it as I woke up, the experience of the dream would gradually fade into myself imagining the dream. It seems strange to completely separate the two

[@Moregano]

You know he's a real philosophy major because his apartment doesn't have heating.

[@doovstoover9703]

I feel like discussions like this seem to boil down to definitions. If you want to answer 'yes' to the question "are dreams real?" then all you're doing is redefining 'reality' to encompass dreams, which is like... so what? We don't even really need to do this step in order to discuss morality in dreams. The real question that we're driving at seems to be 'what criteria are necessary in order for morality to apply?'. We accept that our moral code doesn't apply equally across all aspects of existence - we treat humans differently to cats differently to ants differently to radishes - so if we accept that dream world people are distinct from waking world people, on what basis should we assess whether and to what extent our moral code applies to them?

[@eleven5049]

My man looks like a Russian novel main character. Thank you for video btw.

[@Kentrosauruses]

So your other videos make me doubt things that I thought were real are actually real, but now this video is making doubt things I thought were fake are actually fake!

[@armando5362]

Really love your channel dude

[@carloseliasmartinez6221]

There's a short story by Yasutaka Tsutsui called "The Dabba Dabba Tree" addressing the first topic Kane brought up about how sure we are people in our dreams are actually in our dreams and we are not by any chance awake. The trees produce lucid erotic dreams, but the story plays with the concept that people don't know whether they're dreaming or awake. You can imagine the results.

[@TheBlenderblob]

I remember examining objects and perceiving an unlimited detail far beyond what my eyes could see while waking. Like looking at a telephone pole and my eyes zooming into the tiniest details of the wood in a way more real than reality. Other parts of lucid dreams can lack coherence, like trying to read words off a page is usually impossible.

[@leehayes4019]

Dreaming as imagination was the best part. You said it was not related to the videos arguments? But I think it may be essential. When I have lucid dreamt there is a difference in awareness that changes from perception to imagination. Perhaps it's the shifting neural networks that are active.

[@KaneB]

When I said it wasn't relevant, I was referring to my tangent about my own memories of lucid dreaming, and how my lucid dreams seemed to change from perceptual experience prior to reading the Ichikawa, to mere imagination after reading that article, and then back again a few years later. The important point is that these models of dreaming are extremely controversial; we can't rule out the perceptual model so we don't have a slam-dunk case against the reality of dream worlds. Moreover, we can still say that *if* you ever find yourself in a dream which involves perceptual experience, then the precautionary principle kicks in and you should treat dream characters as if they are real. That conditional claim is the key idea of the video.

[@noonebesides]

@@KaneB I don't think it strange at all that the character of your lucid dreams could be shifted by reading a theory about dreams (even one you don't believe). It isn't uncommon to hear that someone first lucid dreamed soon after learning it is possible. Expectations are the stuff dreams are made of, IMHO. Dreams, as I understand them, are made with a feedback loop of expectations about short term beliefs that are emotionally salient. Usually those beliefs are about low level perceptual channel content. But more abstract linguistic or conceptual relationships can also be dreamed about, since we can believe things about them. And I think those are roughly, fairly equivalent "inputs from some classification layer we can attend to" for the emotional and response planning sections of us. Which are the sections that form the expectations that get fedback into the loop. Happy lucid dreaming, and if I see you "in there" I'll give you a code to test the shared dreaming hypothesis.

[@KaneB]

​@Boulanger On the perceptual model, dream experiences are like perceptions. When I dream of eating an apple, I'm seeing the redness, tasting the sweetness, etc. The experience is the same as the experience of eating a real apple while awake. On the imagination model, dream experiences are like mental images. When I dream of eating an apple, I'm imagining eating an apple; I have the redness and the sweetness in my "mind's eye".

[@SwamyMaximus]

These are excellent but how can I listen through the apple podcast app?

[@mykura2018]

I like your frugality during this winter season :)

[@brandonsaffell4100]

I think the picture painted by both the coherence argument and the intertwined argument both change a bit if you dive into them further, but I don't think that's ultimately relevant. What is our underlying ethical framework? I think we've adopted the stance here that "We should be kind to others who have minds like ours, but only if they're real". For me, who believes in 0 real worlds, but does believe that we should treat our dream residents with kindness that doesn't really work. I believe we should behave with compassion and attempt to reduce the suffering of all beings, be they real or illusory. Rather than asking "are dream worlders real" we might ask "is their suffering worthy of consideration". And all the arguments that might make me consider your suffering are equally applicable to dream residents. A comparison point is video game NPCs. In this case they might respond to our actions with suffering, but we know they have a creator and we can see behind the illusion to understand the suffering is a mere play / act / demonstration. I don't believe we can do that with dream agents. A final thing to consider is virtue. How we treat agents shapes our habits, shapes our interactions with "real" humans. For the noble philosopher it can be easier to break this link, but we are creatures of habit, and habits do strange things to us. If we develop the habit of acting with compassion in our dreams, we may find the tools of the dream world - the habits we form - are able to be wielded in the physical world. The same is true for NPCs and even AI's. If we practice treating them with compassion we build in ourselves a virtuous spirit that persists no matter what reality we might find ourselves in. We can develop strategies of compassion and deploy them in any reality, without worry if it's real or not.

[@shtept9396]

There is one more approach to that dilemma - simply stop caring whether the dream world is real or not. Why not to suggest that postulates of waking world's moral are valid in that exact world only? However, this raises two more questions - is moral the product of this world, and where should we draw the line between any given worlds. P. S. It is not my personal view on the problem. I just like to ponder upon different scenarios.

[@KaneB]

In general, I don't want act cruelly towards other people who have minds like my own. That's why it matters to me whether or not dream worlds are real. If you don't care about how you act towards others, or if you only care about people in waking life regardless of the status of dream characters, then of course you won't be moved by my arguments. The most I could say is that you'd be drawing an arbitrary distinction between people of the waking world and people of the dream world, but perhaps you'd be happy with that arbitrary line.

[@liamcarter7597]

@@KaneB I still think you don’t give a satisfactory answer to why you believe morality is the same in a world that clearly exhibits different laws of physics. The laws of physics are inherently and directly tied to our sense of morality. It sucks to die because that means our chemical system spirals towards equilibrium. We evolve the experience of pain as a way to maintain our chemical system, and prevent equilibrium. In a world where dying is not a real consequence, people could evolve to not even experience pain. And maybe there’s something like you can only dream about women, and therefore there is no immoral acts involving sex, since all of the women actively are trying to get with you, there are no non-consenting women. I think the very fact that you must concede that my dreams could be about anything I could imagine, and the real world you could easily refute any randomly imagined postulation about reality, gives evidence towards dream worlds being imagined. I have a person I communicated with online who would tell me that he has the same dream every night. He said he cannot stand living with this night terror and he described his dream to me. I have no reason to believe that he was lying. There is no event that somebody could tell me that they experienced in a dream world that would cause me skepticism (besides claims of prophecy via dream). And what about when people have ptsd and their dream worlds are completely overrun by repressed psychic content? Why does so much personal experience seep into a world that is not personally imagined? The real world reflects almost nothing of my personal experience. Only what I directly interact with in external reality is stained by my experience. In the dream world, my experience is utterly pervasive.

[@KaneB]

@@liamcarter7597 It sucks to die because dying permanently extinguishes your mind and removes your ability to complete any of your projects... it makes absolutely no difference to me what the underlying laws of physics are. It would be just as bad in an Aristotelian world or a Newtonian world or an Einsteinian world or whatever else. Anyway, I'm an antirealist about science; strictly speaking, I don't think there are any laws, nor do I take current physical theories to provide true descriptions of the world. In my view, scientific theories are tools for systematizing, predicting, and controlling observable phenomena. They are relevant to moral deliberation only insofar as they help us to predict the outcomes of our actions. Concerning the other points: (1) I've never had total control over my dreams, even when I'm lucid. My experience is that in dreams, some things are easily under my control, some things I can influence with effort, and some things seem to be beyond my control -- just as it is in waking life. There are differences in the specifics, of course. I've found that in dreams, I can easily walk through walls. I can't do that in waking life. But I've never been able to conjure dream characters or make them act in ways that I desire. (2) It's interesting that you take recurring dreams as indicating unreality, given that one of the most common arguments in favour of the reality of the waking world appeals to continuity and regularity. In any case, recurring experience is part of waking life. Every day, I repeat many of the same experiences: I do the same things, in the same places, and feel the same ways. When I wake up, I go to the bathroom and brush my teeth using the same toothbrush, and always feel a little irritated that I have to spend a few minutes on this chore. It's not surprising that recurring experiences also happen in dream worlds. (3) I'm not sure what you mean when you say that personal experience "seeps into" dream worlds. Is it that the events that occur in dream worlds seem to reflect one's emotions and goals? That's true, but I don't see why this would indicate that dream worlds are not real. It would just be that dream worlds are more susceptible to mental influences.

[@scrobblesbyDJGunbound]

"The dreamer glimpses things he has never seen before, And they will change him forever In the world of dreams, Things happen that are not possible in the world he came from Questions are answered, But the answers are in a language he’s never heard before He understands that language, though, in the dream Everything is resolved in the dream, or so it seems But it almost remains in the dream When he awakens, he will forget that language It will be incomprehensible again He will only remember that when he heard it, he understood it He will forgot the music he heard in his dream Music that made him fly Music that made him escape from his body Music that made him escape from time itself But he will remembers when he awakens That there was this music That there must be music like this somewhere Even if it is only in dreams The dreamer experiencies everything passively He lies asleep and it moves through him These experiencies may be more Wondrous than anything else he’s ever tasted But they are perpetually out of his grasp The dreamer has no power He has no will The dreams enter through him And he is their vessel"

[@low3242]

Do you think that a Skeptic can be an artist? Or a writer? In writing you have to takes sides and there is no chance of suspension judgement there. What would skeptic art look like?

[@Swishead]

Have you been studying your dreams vs reality chart Dougal?

[@Opposite271]

I do think that Occam’s razor works for the number of axiomatic assumptions that have to be true for a theory to be true. This is because all axioms have to be true for the theory to be true and since they are axiomatic, they are true or false independent of each other. So any axiom is a possible source of error and decreases the a priori probability of a theory. But I don’t think that it can always be used on the number of entities that are postulated. If I would postulate that there are one Appel then it seams to be as probable as postulating that there are three apples since we don’t give a description of particular entities which exist or don’t exist independent of each other. Instead we are just describing a set without specifying what makes the individual apples different from each other. But since we don’t describe simply a set of worlds but two particular worlds for which we give a detailed description, I think that Occam’s razor works on the two world model. But since the dream world exists or doesn’t exist independent of the existence or nonexistence of the waking world, this does not decrease the probability for the existence of the dream world.

[@thomaslodger7675]

When I get enough money Kane B. I am going to subscribe to your Patreon so we can have a discussion. I love your videos because they show me how lazy I am being with reading and studying philosophy.

[@dumbledorelives93]

Saaaame

[@TheGlenn8]

Perhaps this is a bit related to today's topic, but can you ever do a video about exploring the concept of Nozick's experience machine?

[@KaneB]

Already done! kzbin.info/www/bejne/j4LKloicedR0o6M

[@TheGlenn8]

@@KaneB Thanks!

[@Allofyoush]

I combine lucid dreaming and the universe-simulation theory to conceive of the way we would be able to transfer consciousness up a level of reality.

[@SmellySquid]

Couldn't a physicalist technically take up the two world hypothesis given that the physical world is almost defined in terms of causal closure by just citing the physical effects of dreams such as brain activity?

[@KaneB]

If the dream world causally influences the physical world, then yeah, I guess a physicalist could in principle say that. However, causal closure is usually presented as an argument for physicalism rather than definitional of physicalism. Nobody treats Cartesian substance dualism as a form of physicalism, even though it postulates causal interaction between mind stuff and physical stuff.

[@Aorlior]

i get the feeling that he is the best candidate for becoming a solipsist in the near future

[@KaneB]

What I'm saying here seems like the exact opposite of solipsism... if dream worlds are real, there is more to reality than we thought, not less.

[@shadw4701]

My dreams almost all happen in the same world pretty much. I have the same characters, places, storylines, lore, memories ect. I've mostly done this on purpose through the use of dream incubation

[@pmccarthy001]

The center of your discussion reminds me a lot of book I had to read in college... The Kin of Ata are waiting for you. Like many books I was supposed to read I'm not sure I read it all the way through. But I believe it concerns a group of people,... a tribe of sorts... that believes dreams are 'real' and waking life is not. Everything here revolves around what is meant when one says something is 'real'? The cigarette ads I've always loved are dream worlds of sorts. There is a clear coherent theme throughout them, however. I'd characterize it as being that cigarettes are these incredibly magical objects of sorts. And for some of us, living in this dream world can generate a strong desire to buy certain brands of cigarettes and smoke. At some level, this makes sense as the tobacco marketer is trying to sell a product of (argubly) low intrinsic utility. So, the idea is to intimately link cigarettes with unfulfilled needs and desires so as to create within consumers an extrinsically developed utility for cigarettes. Whether or not in the final analysis the cigarettes could ever help fulfill some of those unfulfilled needs and desires depends a lot on the environment. I don't think it's ever helped me socially to speak of, but back 30-40 years ago when our society was more smoking friendly it may have had some social benefits that might have helped to fulfill some of those unfulfilled needs and desires that the cigarette ads connect to. My experience is different. I don't think I've ever met anyone who's as comfortable as I am speaking about their relation to cigarette ads. I think much of this has some correlation to religion. I generally say I'm an atheist... soft atheist, or agnostic atheist. But I'm not an antitheist. In my view, lIke the cigarettes and cigarette ads (certainly!) everything brings both bad and good to the world. Perhaps another question which I relate to all this is... what do the beliefs that we hold do for us? Not so much a focus on whether those beliefs are 'true' (whatever that might be deemed to be), but rather what those beliefs do for us emotionally. Motivation is what I think I'm driving at here. I'm not sure 'truth' is the central thing... I think of ourselves as more being animals and survival as being more central. One difference that comes to mind with the cigarette ads and dreams when you sleep is that cigarette ads are (or were) more on the periphery of consciousness usually... at least for most people. They're not particularly relevant today because they're largely gone. But back when cigarette ads where a ubiquitious feature of our environment they were constantly reinforcing the connection between those unfulfilled needs and desires with cigarettes, and smoking. For someone like myself, it's a lot deeper than that, but except during the intiation of the attachment to cigarettes, cigarette ads remained on the periphery of people's conscious awareness. Acknowledging the role of the cigarette ads like I always have is largely wholly inconsistent with the socialization of the smoking behavior that most people developed. The cigarette ads and their action had to ignored, and tacitly accepted. Of course, the balance that allowed that has completely shifted... that is, largely it's no longer to be ignored and tacitly accepted. Accurate, more complete information about the dangers of smoking has become widely known and many of the society mores and folkways impacting on somethng like smoking has changed profoundly... and a LOT fewer people smoke or have any monetary interest in people smoking and yet those who bear the negative externalities due to smoking still persist but without the political, economic, and social forces of decades past to support smoking. It's difficult because on the one hand 'reality' might never be everythnig we might need and desire, yet our alternate worlds that we might 'dream in' can have consequences in this world, not all of them are good. My cigarette ad dream worlds don't have cancer and emphysema in them, but smoking cigarettes in this world increases the chances of those unfortunate outcomes in this world.

[@marshallferron]

Whether the dream world is a real world or not it can have a huge impact on your psyche. I would advise against acting out your darker fantasies in a dream even if you are sure it's not real. Imagine if it becomes a recurring nightmare only this time you don't become lucid...

[@dumbledorelives93]

Man I sure hope the dream world isn't real because I've done some.... pretty... pretty...pretty bad things in them 😳

[@mrosskne]

I don't see what you mean with the rainforest example. A rainforest is perfectly consistent and coherent. It's just a different set of experiences. That has nothing do with coherence.

[@viewsandrates]

I like this channel

[@davidjoseph7185]

My degree of confidence that the 'real' world is real isn't significantly greater than my degree of confidence that a 'dream' world isn't.

[@Nosirrbro]

The occam’s razor argument doesn’t move you because yeah it’s not actually a good argument, there’s no a priori reason to assume answers to questions are always or tend to be the simplest. That sort of argument only has any strength when empiricism becomes involved, as then you can actually focus on selecting the theory which best fits the data, and that includes weeding out theories which include complications that are not necessary for said theory to fit the data. That in turn allows you to eliminate the infinite number of arbitrarily more complex possible theories, which is a sort of occam’s razor in a way but the only one which there is actually any reason to believe (but in this case it is a posteriori via empirical evidence). This pseudo occam’s razor is the only actually good argument on the topic of if dreams are real, and i think it’s fairly clear that the actual empirical evidence of the material world as a self consistent reality is vastly more empirically evidentiated than that of the dream world, and the theories that explain how our physical world works both explain (at least to an extent) how we humans hallucinate at night and do so without at all requiring any other worlds to fit the empirical data. Now, empiricism isn’t everything of course, but as soon as empericism is excluded entirely from a question it inherently becomes non falsifiable (any philosophical or mental framework you have i could simply reject for my own arbitrarily, you can’t actually falsify my statements unless i’m not being self consistent) I don’t think it’s necessarily unreasonable to believe in something unfalsifiable, but at that point you are engaging in an arbitrary statement more than actually trying the best strategies to actually determine the reality, where it seems more like you are trying to approach the latter by your presentation in this video. So, if we are trying our best strategy for determining reality, which involves empiricism, the data is best fit extremely heavily by the “dreams are just hallucinations” explanation. Now all that being said, id rather treat dream characters nicely anyway, who would want to spend hours dreaming about doing horrible shit every night?

[@CjqNslXUcM]

A huge problem with dreams is memory. We know how incredibly unreliable and flawed human memory is. Do you really remember vivid perceptual dreams, or have you retroactively painted in the memory of what might have been the imagination of a vivid perceptual experience? Can you retrieve any memory of the dream world without irreparably damaging it, and how would you know if you did? You can't film a dream. Feels like trying to carry a sand castle through a waterfall. I'm leaning towards Ichiwaka's view. Doesn't it seem more plausible that your knowledge of Ichikawa changed only your retrieval apparatus, rather than your entire dreaming experience for years? Even when I really challenge myself, I can never remember even close to the amount of detail I would remember in real life. There seems to be no temporal coherence either, I seem to just fast forward to the next impression, just like in imagination. Of course, my memory of the dreaming experience is just as susceptible to my "memory argument" as yours.

[@KaneB]

Yes, I'd be inclined to think that reading the Ichikawa paper changed my memory of dreams, rather than changing the dreams themselves. This doesn't seem to me to favour Ichikawa's model though. It could be that my dreams have always been perceptual experiences, and that reading the Ichikawa paper made me mistakenly interpret them as imagination in retrospect.

[@shadw4701]

Have you been keeping a dream journal? This is the most important thing. Try not to move for a while when first waking up, i recommend about 5-15 minutes and try to peg your memory with places, people and things currently in or that are familiar in life. Meditation can also help. I also have a video or two on my tiktok talking about dream recall. There's also a really good tutorial on the memory peghing thing by lucid dream portal which goes more in depth on it

[@beherenowspace1863]

I have experienced continuity of consciousness from waking to lucid dreaming and from lucid dreaming to waking, so I don't see any special problem of memory there. I am aware of my waking experience now, I am not remembering a previous waking experience; the same happens in a lucid dream.

[@paimon1250]

In terms of how much I remember of my dreams, I remember has much as I do of yesterday, and I remember my dreams quite well with that standard stated.

[@helveticaneptune537]

Kane, just a quick question - do you think space and time are a mental construct rather than an amalgam of the thing-in-itself which is an amorphous mass of time and space which exists outside subjective reality?

[@KaneB]

I'm a constructivist about everything, so yes. However, one of the things we can do is construct the subjective/objective distinction, and project space and time to the latter. This is no more or less a construction than projecting space and time into the former.

[@mrosskne]

Unless someone can perform experiments in a dream and verify a consistent set of physical laws, I have no reason to consider dreams coherent. Unfortunately, no experiment in a dream will ever be able to be verified or replicated by anyone else.

[@EduNauta95]

-The dreamworld is just like life after death. When we dream, we are not ourselves, but rather our own resonance, or reverb. -While we are alive in a physical way, the structure of our body provides a temporal support that anchors and conforms cosmic consciousness to a limited ship. -Our ego is cosmic consciousness separated from the origin, like a drop of water separating itself from a pond. -While awake, consciousness conforms to our body like water to a bowl. -When we are asleep, suddenly there is no bowl and the water behaves freely, interacting and partially re integrating itself with the rest of the cosmic consciousness. -This is why dreams are partially transcendental, since information, shapes, beings, lights, sounds, odours, etc manifest from outside our brain/soul particular knowledge and will power. -The energy contained in our ego is provided by our physical existence, but in a dream we cannot generate new energy, since we are outside physical reality. -Like a musical instrument with reverb applied on, a resonance can be heard after the note has been played, but the resonance is not the note itself. -After the death of physical body, a resonance of the individual experiences a never ending dream state. -In this dream post death, the protagonist of the dream is incapable to 'recharge his energy by physically waking up and returning to his or her physical container to reassemble itself into a solid egoic structure. -Thus, the protagonist slowly dissolves itself, by virtue of forgetting who he or she is, or was, merging with other dream characters and locations, and evaporating itself into cosmic consciousness again. -According to taoist thought, some parts of the soul, the more negative, dark, heavy, sink and get trapped inside physical landscapes, persisting in the form of phantasmic residues aka ghosts. -Ghosts are not the soul of the deceased, but rather a fragmented residue of him or her, some sort of loop of experience, memory or emotion that is tangled with other elements of existence in a knot, and can only dissipate after a cathartic experience inside the experiental dream of this ghost. -Another part of the soul, the more positive one, flames upwards towards what could be called a heaven, or an afterlife, and fuses with other experiences like an ingredient thrown into a soup. -Another part of the soul, if it's more masculine and depended on the God principle to exist physically (such as life decisions and workmanships done thanks to the aid and remembrance of the eternal perspective), gets frozen up and integrated into a supratemporal structure of souls, a God, in whose bosom it can crystalise itself into a seeming eternity (which lasts as long as the Godhood warp balloon lasts before it too eventually runs of fuel).

[@EduNauta95]

-So, in a nutshell, our dream self is the resonance/reverb of our physical self mingling freely with the rest of cosmic consciousness. -After we die, the resonance continues until the signal is lost for lack of energy and too much noise (we forget who we are). -In waking life this doesn't happen because cosmic consciousness is conformed by energetic inputs that stem from the body which give a shape to our experience (the 5 senses, and the vibes our organs and extremities give off). -This set of bodily inputs shaves and reupdates constantly an ever expansive and free flow of consciousness. -The more stable through time does this ebbing and shaping process occur, the more an egoic structure forms, which behaves like an arrow pointing to a new direction that cosmic consciousness doesn't inhabit yet. -Buddhism says this structure is false and artificial, yet abrahamic religions say this structure can crystalise into a heavenly eternity.

[@EduNauta95]

Dreams as imagination is a poor model. The fact is that we don't have the capacity to imagine such detailed structures as they appear in lucid dreams, or have conversations with such new information that we intimately know we didn't know them before. When people say that the 'subconscious' does it, it's a cop out response that isn't consistent with the claim that we as individuals are the total creators of our dream experience. There is no way to separate what is 'me' in the subconscious, or if just subconsciously linked to an external spiritual landscape.

[@gorsian1979]

Dreams or Lucid Dreams happen when your Soul partially leave your Body During Sleeping and it interact in other Realm in heavens that has Differ Characteristics from Our World then your mind Just work as a Receptor for what your Soul has interact and Seen in the Dream Realm in the Heavens

[@shadw4701]

Dreams are 100% simulation and not alternate realities. We wouldn't be able to become literal gods in them if that was the case

[@davidjoseph7185]

As Jesus said, "There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him".

[@liamcarter7597]

In dream worlds, the laws of physics are clearly different, and allow for god like characters such as the lucid dreamer. Why then should I assume that these worlds with different physics and experiences should hold the same moral standards as our world? It’s probably fine to exercise your abilities within the dream world, since you, or another dreamer/dream world character, could will dead people back, or you could rewind time and change what happens. I also don’t at all believe that dream worlds exist on a physical plane in any sense. The dream worlds are always so obviously created by and related to the human animal that bears my name. The animal that generates all of the psychic phenomena that I experience and am a part of are have a psychic signature. The manifestations of purely personal experiences and thoughts manifest within dreamscapes. I never dream about other people’s experiences, and I never dream about things that are not inherently tied to the experience of myself. Even if you hold the opinion that these psychic worlds are real, or exist always, even when I’m not dreaming. Say there’s a part of my brain that always holds the information (or save data) of my dream content, worlds always being simulated unconsciously, then oh well?? Who cares? Should I not kill people in gta because a robot stores that information? Also I will say that I don’t have a lot of experience with dreams these days. Most of my direct encounters with the unconscious are facilitated through psychoactive substances. But I’ve had lucid dreams in the past, and plenty of normal dreams. I mean, I suppose I still have dreams, I just don’t recall them. Also, if you take the position that dream worlds are real, do you then also believe that the worlds experienced on psychedelics are real? I am extremely against the opinion that psychosis is in any way an experience of something real. That is too dangerous of a belief, and if you’ve known anybody with schizophrenia, it is not good to lean into the delusions. And what you experience on psychedelics, schizophrenic psychosis, and dreams seem to all be linked. Some psychologists theorize that psychosis is when the brain system that facilitates dreams is active at the same time as your waking brain networks. There’s also a phenomena where people can have full on, vivid psychedelic experiences within a dream. And how come it’s impossible to have a vivid psychedelic trip dream before you’ve ever had a waking psychedelic experience?

[@liamcarter7597]

And to add on: In the dream world, the human animal you’re attached to during waking life is not necessarily extant; yet the basis of the dream world is that very human. That individual is integral to the construction of the dream world, whereas in waking life, the world does not generally reflect your personal experience. Even your subjective experience of the world is more inherently tied to your species than it is to any individual. We all see the same colors because we have the same cones in our eyes. They’re like a filter that the light goes through. The observation that different individuals have the same color cones to one observer is evidence that the subjective experience of color is at least very similar for all people, and people don’t experience a world of inverted colors as compared to your experience, because it would be evidenced by different colored cones. In the same vein, most of subjective human perception is similar among the species, and therefore we all experience this shared, external reality. We evolved within this reality to experience this reality. We can make measurements that are corroborated by others. There is significant evidence that it existed before you, and that it will exist after you. The dream world however, it is impossible to attain new information. You could perhaps come to new insights based on information already consumed, but you could never experience something that you couldn’t imagine within a dream. And you could do that in external reality. When you’re a child it happens probably everyday. But when you’re a child, your dreams are still completely fabricated upon already internalized content. I have very good memory, I can remember some of my more vivid dreams from when I was around 4-5 years old. I would only dream of concepts learned of in the real world; such as frogs, slides, people, buildings, feelings, etc. All only previously felt before being dreamt. How do you remedy this?

[@KaneB]

The laws of physics don't have any direct relevance to my moral attitudes. I don't want to impose suffering on other people. Whether those other people are composed of parts that exhibit quantum indeterminacy or are governed by strict Newtonian laws or whatever else makes no difference to me. Of course, if death is reversible in the dream world, then that makes a difference. But I still take it that suffering and unhappiness is possible in dream worlds since I sometimes such emotions in dreams, and I don't want to cause such emotions in others. >> I never dream about other people’s experiences, and I never dream about things that are not inherently tied to the experience of myself. In general, you don't experience other people's experiences, whether in waking worlds or dream worlds. You can't literally get inside another person's mind and experience things from their point of view. You only have access to their observable behaviour, from which you can make inferences about what their experiences might be like. Dream characters are sometimes sufficiently similar to me, and sufficiently similar to the people I encounter in the waking world, that I would assume that if they are real, they probably have minds like mine. >> Also, if you take the position that dream worlds are real, do you then also believe that the worlds experienced on psychedelics are real? Sure, I think the precautionary principle should apply in those cases too. When you encounter DMT entities you should act as if they are real and treat them kindly. >> I am extremely against the opinion that psychosis is in any way an experience of something real. That is too dangerous of a belief My claim is not that people should believe that dream worlds as real. It's simply that there isn't a slam-dunk case against the reality of dreams, and so we should act *as if* they are real when we find ourselves in them. Let's say that I have a 95% credence that dream worlds are not real. So I believe that dream worlds are not real, but I recognize the epistemic possibility that I could be mistaken. To me, even a fairly small chance that I'm dealing with another person who has a mind like mine is a good enough reason to treat them kindly. There's very little cost to kindness, but real violence and coercion is by my standards extremely bad. If there's even a relatively small risk that the violence would be done to a real person, I will prefer to avoid it.

[@KaneB]

​@@liamcarter7597 We don't have a scientific theory of the dream world (or dream worlds) that is anywhere near as sophisticated as our theory of the waking world. Indeed, our best scientific theory of the dream world is that it isn't really a world at all, but is instead a kind of hallucination or illusion generated by brain processes. But so what? My claim is only that there isn't a slam-dunk case against the reality of dream worlds. There are plenty of alternative explanations for why our best theories do not postulate the reality of dream worlds, even under the assumption that dream worlds are real. For one thing, most of the time in dream worlds, we are not actually engaging in the kind of critical, reflective thought that is required for sophisticated rational inquiry. We don't have an understanding of e.g. the laws that govern dream worlds, or the kinds of objects of which dream worlds are composed, or the relation between dream worlds and waking worlds, etc., because we've simply never tried to develop a theory of this. It could also be that dream worlds might simply be less responsive to the kind of reductive scientific project that has born so much fruit in the waking world. Dream worlds might be less induction-friendly than the waking world. Etc. >> The dream world however, it is impossible to attain new information. You could perhaps come to new insights based on information already consumed, but you could never experience something that you couldn’t imagine within a dream This isn't my experience. I often have new and unexpected experiences in dreams. Granted, it's rare that I ever experience anything in a dream that I couldn't imagine, but it's also rare that this ever happens in waking life. If anything, I think this is more common in dreams. Sometimes weird stuff happens with the passage of time in dreams, or sometimes I'll have the experience of e.g. knowing what's happening in a room, without being able to perceive anything in the room. In retrospect, it's hard to make sense of these dream experiences. >> I would only dream of concepts learned of in the real world; such as frogs, slides, people, buildings, feelings, etc As I mentioned, it seems to be generally the case that in dream worlds, rational, reflective thought is less likely to come online, and we never engage in long-term collaborative inquiry with others. So it's not surprising to me that most concept acquisition occurs in the waking world.

[@liamcarter7597]

@@KaneB okay, you bring up a fair point about giving dream beings the benefit of the doubt. In my mind though, I still wholeheartedly believe that what you experience during dmt is a manifestation of your unconscious mind. I personally have not had too much experience with dmt, and therefore have not experienced any autonomous entities, but my opinion is that if/when I do encounter one, that it will just be a dissociated part of myself. One region of my brain talking to another region with an accompanying perceptual experience. Of course I would never go out of my way to be rude or hurtful to what I believe is my own self, but people will say things like the entities tell them to stop doing so much dmt or whatever, and if that happened to me I would likely not respect the wishes of the entity. Although I don’t think that would happen, since I believe autonomous entities and you share the same will, and since I don’t hold any superstition about tripping too often, I don’t think my mind would tell me to do it less often. And what is your take on committing despicable actions in non-lucid dreams? Should we feel bad when we awake only to realize we had a dream where we did some crazy shit? And in the dream world I have never experienced pain or any negative physical sensation. Only negative emotions or thoughts. I can remember being terrified that there are snakes loose all over my house, but not once did I get bit by one. In my most vivid lucid dream, which I think reoccurred, but maybe I’m misremembering on that front, but I was in a terrifying situation where I was trapped on top of the top bunk of my old bed and below was a tank of hermit crabs that all had super spiny shells and there were super spiny and sharp adornments also in the tank. Outside of the window my driveway was blocked off by logs in the road. I just felt trapped and so anxious and bad. The situation was so stressful that I came to the realization that I had to be within a dream, and instantly my anxiety died down. I stepped into the tank on a spot that cleared up from sharp things, I realized it was only dangerous because I was making it that way. I looked back out the window and saw as the logs retreated from the driveway. It wasn’t like I willed for those things to happen, I didn’t feel like I made them happen. It felt like all I did was realize I was dreaming, and suddenly good things started happening. This suggests to me that my dream is actively constructed by my unconscious mind. In my dreams these days, I think cannabis causes my dream recall to be nearly nonexistent. And when I do recall my dreams, they almost always have something to do with a friend from my past that I long for, or I have a dream where some stressor occurs, and then I find solace in the fact that I have weed. And going on with the lack of physical sensation, I don’t think I ever remember smoking weed in my dreams, it’s always just an instant de-stressor to have the peace of mind that I have it and can smoke it. Idk, I don’t dream enough to really put this into practice with the whole being compassionate to psychic entities deal, but I think generally my dreams exist to torment me, and not the other way around. They do clearly display deep unconscious thoughts though, I’ve had dreams that surfaced ideas that I have actively suppressed. And what are your thoughts on this if you don’t mind sharing: On psychedelics I’ve had these moments where I have a vision where I am on a field with some black slaves. They’re so black, and it seems more clear and real than waking reality. It’s like seeing these people makes it clear that black people today have been heavily mixed. And then I’ll come back from one of these visions with my appetite lost and just feeling really bad about slavery. I’ve thought about making a song where it’s about how I have these visions, but I interpret it as the visions being reality, and my normal waking reality being a delusion to cope with the horrors of slavery. I think it could be a cool artistic concept, but I don’t believe that those visions are real in any way.

[@liamcarter7597]

@@KaneB thank you for taking the time out of your day to respond to me! I appreciate the perspective, as well as the opportunity to think about things I otherwise wouldn’t. I’ll have to develop aa more in depth theory of dreams, it’s just unfortunate that I very rarely recall them.

[@ganglandsublimity]

@KaneB I just want to say that there is a lot of research that has been done about what dreams are / what they're function is, and it seems to be implicated that dreams either used or are epiphenomenal to memory generation / storage

[@liamcarter7597]

Yeah, it seems integral for long term memory storage. And generally people will only remember one dream per night, but they consistently have multiple dreams every night. They also say that having your eyes closed for just one hour causes your brain to already start rearranging itself to make room where the visual cortex is for other brain functions. Since the visual cortex is so essential to human functioning, and it takes up such a large portion of the brain, it must always be doing things to prevent the brain from adapting to better preform other functions. Blind people will have very small visual cortexes as compared to normal people because they spend so much time with it not doing anything.

[@shadw4701]

There are multiple scientific theories on why dreams happen but I honesty think they're all kind of true

[@СергейМакеев-ж2н]

How is physicalism even relevant here? On physicalism, there can easily be an unknown physical mechanism in the brain that transmits and receives information from some sort of "dream world", or simulation, or whatever. One can object to that on simplicity grounds, of course, but that's hardly a "slam dunk" case. And regarding the "dreams as imagination" theory: I think it can be also reformulated as "dreams as propositions". When you're dreaming of sitting in front of a computer, that's your brain generating a _belief_ that says, literally, "I am sitting in front of a computer", and nothing more to it. When you perceive the dream-experience as vivid and detailed, that's your brain having a _belief_ that says, verbatim, "This experience feels vivid and detailed" - _and nothing more to it._ No actual detail gets generated until you specifically direct your attention towards something. I think Daniel Dennett wrote about something like that in "Consciousness Explained".

[@noonebesides]

As another lucid dreamer who has tested dream worlds while in them for a while, I find the idea that dreams can't have perceptual content absurd. You might as well argue that people didn't have perceptions their childhood home years ago, they only have a belief now that they had those perceptions then.

[@СергейМакеев-ж2н]

@@noonebesides I'm not saying they _can't_ have perceptual content, I'm saying it's _possible_ that they don't. In the waking life, the brain's belief-generator gets its information from perceptions. In a dream state, it gets information from some _other_ source - which _may_ be related to perceptions, but may also be something else entirely. Either way, the only thing you have conscious access to is beliefs.

[@KaneB]

>> On physicalism, there can easily be an unknown physical mechanism in the brain that transmits and receives information from some sort of "dream world", or simulation, or whatever I suppose this is just a definitional question of whether this would count as physicalism. I suspect that most physicalists would say no. On the other hand, I also suspect that if we were to acquire convincing empirical evidence for the reality of dream worlds and the interaction between dream worlds and waking worlds, then dream worlds and the currently unknown forces that link them to the waking world would retroactively get counted as "physical". Similarly, the discovery of bizarre quantum phenomena did not refute physicalism; we simply changed our conception of what it is for something to be physical.

[@liamcarter7597]

@@KaneB I don’t think we changed the concept of the physical with the dawn of quantum mechanics. We just accepted new physical interactions. We didn’t have to change the definition of a physical interaction, we just discovered new interactions. The physical is what is observed to be a part of external reality. Quantum mechanics fit that. Mental phenomena doesn’t fit that. In the event that the dream world were proven to be a physical realm that can be visited, it would not change anything about the definition of what’s physical, it would just mean something we thought wasn’t physical was in fact physical. In the event that everything imagined gets manifested into a physical reality that we then view, that wouldn’t change the definition of what’s physical, even though it would radically change our ideas of what’s physical and what’s not.

[@liamcarter7597]

@Boulanger if you read my comment then you wouldn’t need to ask that, as I explicitly define it. Maybe a better way to look at what’s physical would be to define it by what’s not physical. Anything imagined is not real, anything real is physical. The phenomena of dreams is real (i.e. dreams have a corresponding brain state), whereas dream content is imagined (according to our best scientific theory). If we discovered that dream content is not imagined, then that doesn’t change the definition of physical, it changes our understanding of dream content. It switches our consideration of dream content to be physical, rather than changing the definition of physical to include imagined dream content. The definition of what’s physical didn’t change with quantum mechanics, just our understanding of physics was changed by it. Another simple definition of physical is just, ‘relating to physics or the operation of natural forces generally.’ My background is in physics, so I may take my understanding of the physical for granted, but if you made yourself aware of what is studied under physics, then probably you’d have a more complete picture of what’s physical. My idol is Einstein and he is one of the major constructors of quantum mechanics, but he also held ideas that contradict the idealist thinking of others associated with quantum thinking. A lot of what is ‘remarkable’ or things that seemingly change what we consider physical is only in the theory. And despite that, by definition of the physical being what is related to or studied by physics, quantum mechanics is intrinsically tied to being physical, since it is a branch of physics. Anything discovered within this branch would be considered physical. I think my definition in my first comment was apt, but if you didn’t appreciate that one, hopefully this one helped you better understand.

[@VAL30007]

The pain is real

[@KaneB]

Or is it? In my experience, pain and suffering in dream worlds is nowhere near as distressing as pain and suffering in the waking world. I've often felt pains in dreams, or been in extremely unpleasant situations such as e.g. being shot and believing that I'm about to die... but then it just doesn't particularly bother me. Perhaps this is one reason to be less concerned about how we treat dream characters, even if the dream characters are real people.

[@PeteMandik]

Another reason I’m glad I’m not ethical.

[@eotenas]

😈

[@ramiusstorm5664]

You can't lucid dream at the same time you believe it's real. Lucid dreaming by definition means you are aware it's a dream within it. So false dreams aren't real, paradoxically I believe real is dream.

[@KaneB]

My experience of lucid dreaming is that I simply become aware that I'm dreaming, i.e. I am in a dream world. There need not be any assumption one way or the other about whether the dream world is real.

[@ramiusstorm5664]

@@KaneB lucid dreaming has allowed me to make government intelligence submit to extortion with weather modification so extreme scientists refer to it as climate change, this occurred in the so called waking world. This situation ended in 2019, now economic warfare is the consequence.

[@Bibibosh]

kane is so young and nieve like me like all of us. to fixsate on ideas and dwell is closed minded. we all are close minded to every single idea in realitty.

[@KaneB]

I'm 31... maybe not that young lol

[@liamcarter7597]

What is the practical application of this idea? What was even the point of saying it? If naïveté is universal, then it’s not at all pragmatic to call us naïve. Relative to the other naïve beings, there will still be a spectrum in which some people are more and some people are less naïve. And in that classification, the actually naïve people are those naïve relative to the general population. No point in comparing us to gods when there’s been no extant organism more intelligent than the human as far as humans are aware.

[@Bibibosh]

@@liamcarter7597 it wasnt a insult. i think kane b is awesome. But. we humans fixsate on ideas based on our own reality. everybody has a different life so different ideas spawn!

[@cringeypopsicle589]

@@Bibibosh just like you're fixated on this "people are fixated.." BS

[@jonstewart464]

I reckon my confidence that the waking world is real (i.e. it's out there, experienced by other minds) is about the same as my confidence that dream worlds are "not real", i.e. they're just the contents of my consciousness. There's no slam dunk argument against solipsism, just as there might not be a slam dunk argument against the reality of dream worlds. In both cases we're relying on the usual abductive reasoning that underpins just about all our understanding of the world. As another commenter says, dreams can usefully be compared to psychedelic experiences. If I take a large enough dose of a psychedelic I can close my eyes and drift off into a mental landscape with vivid visual imagery and bizarre unconstrained thoughts that's fairly similar to dreaming. And it's totally obvious to me that this is an altered state of consciousness, not an alternate real world. This is no slam dunk argument, but it shines a light on how the brain can conjure another world within consciousness when unconstrained by sensory input and normal waking function. The brain doing this while we sleep is a much, much more compelling explanation for my experience than dream worlds being real, and that's as much as I need to act on that basis.

[@pandawandas]

Why is it a compelling explanation? It doesn’t seem like an explanation, there’s no reason why brains doing stuff would create experiences.

[@jonstewart464]

@@pandawandas I agree that if we were just looking at brains from the outside we'd have no reason to think that they would create experiences. But we're not just looking at brains from the outside, we're experiencing what it's like to be a brain (an embodied brain) and we can correlate brain activity with experience. If you have a stroke and it wipes out half your vision, you'll be pretty sure that your visual cortex doing stuff used to create experience but it doesn't anymore.

[@pandawandas]

@@jonstewart464 but this is circular reasoning. I deny that we experience being a brain, one could take it that the brain is just what our experiences look like from an external perspective. So mess with the brain, you mess with the experience - but it isn’t the brain CAUSING the experience. The brain is the outer representation of it. Or just deny causality altogether - goodness knows it’s not the strongest claim and there have been many strong critiques of it.

[@jonstewart464]

@@pandawandas My comment isn't circular reasoning, but it does assume (rather than argue for) a broadly materialist perspective. If you're coming from a commitment to idealism then you're starting from different underlying assumptions, and you won't find appeals to the best explanation assuming materialism (or dualism) compelling. FWIW I don't find idealism at all appealing. Materialism has the hard problem of consciousness unsolved - different flavours of idealism seem to me to move this problem around or make it worse. It's not for me. As for denying causality, well yeah. We can certainly question causation, just like we can question induction or the external world. But if we chuck out any of these then we've just binned any discussion of explanations. Which is fine if that's your aim.

[@anthonyazzopardi273]

Modernism ever!

[@humanrights5742]

I kill one of my uncle in my dreams who emotionally & physically abuse me as a child, after doing healing work, I've seen I'm throwing him under the bus, physcologically speaking means I've released all my resentment and anger, for me dreams acts as healing stamps they shows what you've to heal and get rid off.

[@rizwanmanaf3682]

Pessimism=kane b

[@SajiSNairNair-tu9dk]

👉🛌🎞️🎯

[@real_pattern]

the first thing i'll do when i become lucid in a dream is to pay for a lifetime's worth of Kane B private 🔴tutoring.

[@georgeschlaline6057]

End time dreams are reality Jesus is coming soon