Avoiding overfitting has struck me as being possibly behind the creativity and psychological benefits that some people experience from psychedelics too. Psychedelics seem to be capable of kicking the brain out of some kind of local maximum in which it is stuck.
Being "stuck in a rut," having depression or PTSD, or just being uncreative could be symptoms of the brain having overfit to some past set of stimuli.
At least this paper cites Hinton et al. (1995). The wake-sleep algorithm for unsupervised neural networks which conjectures just the same roles for dreaming.
But as far as I can see there is absolutely nothing new provided here about experiments on brain or psyche.
You'd think 28 years is a bit long a delay to try to claim a pilfered engineering theory as your own before the medical community?
Friston was at least more timely.
I don't have access to a WIRED subscription currently, so I only see the first few lines, but then again a flavor for some problems with that article seems to start right at the title and opening paragraphs.
"The Genius Neuroscientist Who Might Hold the Key to True AI"
Karl Friston's free energy principle might be the most all-encompassing idea since the theory of natural selection. But to understand it, you need to peer inside the mind of Friston himself.
The gist of the problem is Karl Friston didn't come up with the idea in question, yet somehow he's often promoted publicly much as if he did.
Variational free energy methods generally are pretty amazing. Thanks to mathematicians, physicist, chemists and so on over the course of the last three centuries or so for giving us that.
Free energy methods in perception and learning are also very interesting, and that goes back at least to Geoff Hinton, Richard Zemel and Radford Neal in the mid 90s (arguably there is relevant prior work in psychology and energy based ANN before that too).
It's hard to believe Friston's application of the theory to brain function (as opposed to earlier in brain imaging) would be independent of having arrived at University College London, where people at Gatsby Unit (Hinton, Peter Dayan, etc) had been working with the methods in innovative and and effective ways for machine learning/artificial intelligence/theoretical neuroscience since the 90s.
Yet if you entered the subfield through Friston's citations, which many people now do, due in no small part to glowing personality portraits like the one presented by WIRED, you might easily come away with the impression that the whole field suddenly manifested out of whole cloth between the ears of this Genius Neuroscientist, some time in the 00s.
Friston does have one real distinguishing contribution to his name though, in being the first person to reach wide attention making vocal and bold claims that the "free energy principle" amounts to a largely comprehensive explanation for how the human brain works.
Good for him if that turns out to be the case I guess, but personally I'm not aware of any demonstrations that it actually is such a powerful explanation for any mechanisms of brain function.
I have no personal knowledge of Karl Friston, but I've heard he's often well liked in personal contacts.
I don't really know enough about the medical imaging methods era of his work to comment on it.
I used to dream a lot as a kid. Somewhere along the way that basically stopped happening. It’s come back somewhat in mid life but not with the intensity and sticking power that dreams in youth had.
I have a wild pet theory that drinking caffeine consistently prevents people from dreaming. Antidoteally, people that I meet that avoid regular caffeine seem to report having dreams on a regular basis. Conversely, the people I know that drink a lot of caffeine seem to say that they never remember their dreams.
I've also noted today many people who take cannabis regularly also do not dream often.
Personally speaking, both presence and intensity of dreams has almost a direct 1:1 correlation with how much I've learned or participated in mentally challenging tasks the day prior.
Most of the times I don't remember having dreamt are those when I've been more or less living on autopilot, with nothing novel in work or leisure time. Recently I've had an explosion of vivid dreams that lines up almost perfectly with doing things I'd not had prior experience with when programming in both work and hobby projects.
I've been on a pretty consistent one cup of coffee and occasional second cup over the course of the pandemic. The only way caffeine impacts my sleep is if I have it past 1-2PM, in which case I find it harder to fall asleep and may wake up periodically but will still dream.
It's well known that sleep-deprived people have shorter and fewer REM sleep periods. So, presumably sleep deprived-people likely have fewer dreams. That doesn't necessarily mean they'd remember fewer of them, but it wouldn't be a big stretch.
Personally, the amount of sleep I get correlates strongly with the amount that I remember dreams.
I suspect caffeine intake is correlated with sleep deprivation bidirectionally. People who don't have the free time to afford enough sleep tend to drink more caffeine to compensate, and people who drink more caffeine tend to have lower quality of sleep.
So, I suspect that it's the length of sleep that's really the relevant factor here.
I've also heard from several friends that nicotine patches cause very vivid dreams almost every night. Caffeine certainly isn't nicotine, but the case for stimulants in general causing a lack of dreams. Maybe caffeine is an outlier in this regard, but, like I said, I suspect caffeine intake is primarily a confounder for sleep deprivation.
Let me then be the first in your contradictory sample. I drink caffeine more than ever and have consistently been experiencing a higher number of vivid dreams in the past year or so.
Same here. I also find I have more vivid dreams if I'm dehydrated or hungover, do you find the same? (And to add another factor, do you drink alcohol?)
Alcohol suppreses REM sleep, resulting in a rebound effect. This can happen in the same night, resulting in more vivid and memorable dreams closer to morning when, for a number of reasons, we are more likely to remember them.
"Having dreams" in this case would mean remembering dreams. You dream whenever you go into REM sleep, but remembering those dreams requires active training, since your mind is kind of designed to block all that out.
Oh, here's a fun one for you. Have a dream where in the dream you tell yourself you'll only remember this dream because you're about to get woken up. Then get woken up by something you had no control over moments later.
All I can assume is this is a pretty common thing I do in my deep sleep dreams and I don't happen to wake up to remember it.
Absolutely the point, you don't just stop dreaming.
I had a period where I would actively make an effort to write down any dream right after waking up, and lo and behold I dreamt every night.
Now that I've stopped doing that I remember maybe one or two dreams a month.
Not sure if you will read this but wanted to let you know that I found your theory intriguing and decided to cut caffeine to test.
First day light headache. Second day onward totally fine.
Dreams are back!! Not kidding at all. Over the last few days I’ve had much more vivid and sticking dreams. Some of them bad, but dreams nonetheless!
Thanks for putting forth this theory. I will be reducing my caffeine intake permanently. I beleive dreaming is a healthy part of being alive, and I’ve been missing it.
I don't think you can generalize from your experience. I drink tons of coffee and have wild dreams every night. They're even wilder on the rare occasions I smoke pot.
I'm not discounting the potential effect of substances on REM, and as a drinker I'm aware of the deficit during the first 4 hours of drunk sleep. But really, I don't think people are talking about dreaming here so much as the perception or recollection of dreaming. I've made a point of keeping a notepad next to my bed for about 10 years. If someone had asked me before that how often I dream, I would've said maybe once a week. I don't think keeping a journal actually made me dream any more often. It's just that once I really made it a habit to access the halfway state by jotting a note every time I woke up, I became aware that I have 3-4 crazy dreams every night. The only exception is drunken blackouts, but I'd lay odds that's because I just don't wake up often enough to write them down.
I think it is somewhat scientific at this point that cannabis prevents dreams (or at least the memory of them upon waking). And going off weed can lead to much more vivid dreams until one is once again acclimated to being weed-free.
This feels like it could be true - I think dreams went to near zero for me around the time I started drinking coffee and tea consistently. But so much else in life was changing at the same time, it's hard to be sure.
Counter anecdote: my partner has been a coffe drinker since the age of 5, multiple a day, even right before bed (cultural norm is South Africa). She dreams a lot. Extremely vivid and remembers a lot.
Yeah I quit a few years ago and before quitting I very rarely had dreams. Now I have at least one dream every night. Also convinced a few people to quit and they reported the same thing.
Did you compensate for less caffeine by getting proper rest at night? Many people quit caffeine at the same time they resolve to get a proper amount of sleep. I suspect getting enough sleep is the causative factor and caffeine intake is a confounding variable.
I stopped drinking caffeine for a few years (maybe 3?) and have restarted also for a few years (probably 5 now) and I dream fairly rarely both when drinking caffeine and not.
From the inside it’s impossible to distinguish "not having dreams" from "not remembering one’s dreams". From the outside it’s almost certainly the latter. REM almost certainly equals dreaming, and the lack of REM is a rare condition and pretty bad news.
Apparently young children have more REM sleep (the stage when dreams and nightmares happen) than adults. Babies actually spend half their time in REM sleep (https://www.sleepfoundation.org/baby-sleep/baby-sleep-cycle) before they develop adult sleep cycles, which makes me wonder what a newborn baby dreams about.
I hope so, but my son definitely seemed to have several nightmares, waking visibly frightened and crying before he was 9 months old. I don't know what kind of nightmares he'd have, as I don't think I ever saw him frightened when awake, and he only cried when he was hungry. (Such an easy baby to take care of, though I needed to manually check his diaper. If he was crying, he was definitely hungry. Apparently many babies cry if they've wet their diaper.) His nightmare were presumably hunger and/or abandonment.
My son also seems to share my abnormal reaction to pain... beyond a fairly tolerable threshold, I go numb. I know I've injured myself somewhat seriously if I feel quickly rising pain followed by numbness. When my tooth got knocked loose, it went numb. The three times I've sprained ankles (once in the woods, 3 days form the nearest hill with cell phone coverage), my ankles have gone numb. The time the cartilage in my nose tore from the bone, it also went numb. Ditto for the time I burned my finger while arc welding (though, I think that time I killed the dentrite back to my spine and it had to grow back out). My son takes a tough fall and other parents look at me like they expect my son is going to cry, and my son just gets up and keeps playing. So, I don't think his nightmare were about pain, either.
He just spent his entire life in a nice cozy temperature controlled pool with a constant IV of nutrients. Now he's been thrust into this dry liquidless, cold, world with intermittent nutrition. Kinda sucks if you think about it.
My pet theory: just because you don’t ‘remember’ you dreams doesn’t mean you didn’t have them. This would result in wildly in accurate correlations (lack of coffee = more dreams, weed smokers = don’t dream). There are always counter examples to any correlation you can come up with which can’t be ignored.
I’ve personally decided my conscience mind doesn’t need to bother myself with what my meatware is doing while I sleep. People tell me I don’t dream because I don’t remember them.
I think that’s false. Sometimes I remember that I dreamed for a few seconds after a wake up, then it fades. I’ve rolled with it and intentionally forget my dreams. Not my (conscience kinda) business. When I wake it my turn to go get food and water so we can come back to sleep 18 hours later.
> People tell me I don’t dream because I don’t remember them. I think that’s false. Sometimes I remember that I dreamed for a few seconds after a wake up, then it fades.
I have confirmed this with experiments - I have woken up in the night, written down my dream and went back to sleep.
When I woke up in the morning I couldn't remmeber a thing and the notes seemed like they were written by someone else. There was no 'yeah, i can sort of remmember it" - memory was totally blank. The experiment is fairly repeatable - not every night, but couple times a week.
I thought this was common knowledge. If you google "does everyone dream" you will see about a million articles that say some variation of "we all dream every night but don't remember most of them". It's so common it's like one of those aphorisms or old wives tales you just hear everywhere.
I have no way nor intention to judge your life. I think it's more about knowledge pressure than monotonous life. you can be havein an exciting life and never exercise your thinking muscles, and a miserable life while learning new things every day, and all variation in between.
as a matter of fact, the six month where I had to learn thousand pages per week were some of the most miserable I had in the last two years because job kept me away from my newborn, it did a number on my health, and I'm barely returning to normal right now.
This is like saying you can't believe gravity exists and need references.
I mean, haven't checked about weed as I don't use it, but about alcohol it's one of the most well know facts about it, and there are tons of studies, and mentions in every major work about sleep quality, academic or layman level...
Limit alcohol, because alcohol is not a sleep aid, contrary to popular belief. While it might help induce sleep, “alcohol is one of the most powerful suppressors of REM [rapid-eye-movement] sleep,” Walker says:
And, unfortunately, the article doesn't mention any of it. The obvious prediction is: people who don't dream, don't generalize. But the author slyly slinks away from that by saying that "it is likely that adult humans already have well-fitted perceptual models", leaving a bunch of predictions that don't really address the hypothesis, but will be claimed as support when they turn out true anyway.
>And, unfortunately, the article doesn't mention any of it. The obvious prediction is: people who don't dream, don't generalize.
Which could very well be true, with a small correction: people who don't dream don't generalize well - their generalization capabilities decline. Or course with people who don't sleep well, their whole mental faculties decline over time.
Even after a couple of days lost sleep, people have been shown to drop several IQ points in standardized tests... and even lower quality sleep can lead to psychosis and worse (which could very well be fueled by lack of generalization).
Plus this "cleaning" process is not the part we remember as a story/dream when we wake: dreaming includes the parts we don't remember, including the botched parts that never fully made it into full deep REM sleep and conscious dreaming. So, people who don't dream will still clean up some of the overfitting, just do a worse job at it...
I usually dream when I have slept really well for a few days. At least for me when my mind is tired I fall into dreamless sleep in a few seconds, instead of several minutes with a soft transition to dreaming.
This is only tangentially related, but when I was a teenager I practiced remembering my dreams. And now I cannot forget them.
This is actually negativity impacting me. I often get reality confused with something I have dreamed. I cannot always remember if a conversation I had occurred in my dreams or in reality.
I've had this somewhat while taking prozac. My dreams are so vividly remembered, and the contents of those dreams often so mundane, that its not always obvious to me which is which (e.g. dreaming that I bought eggs and milk). I think this is why we're actually supposed to forget memories; they are counterfactuals used to train the brain to avoid overfitting, but not supposed to interfere with our actual recollection of what has and has not occurred.
I like to think that dreams are our brains tuning in to the many lives of ourselves across the multiverse. there are infinite possibilities, and while sleeping in this dimension, we are experiencing our life on a different timeline. the theory is impossible to prove and is a highly unlikely reality, but it's fun as hell to think about it that way
same for me and it ya it does in the sense that in waking life the brain experiences the what is(or what we think is), where in dreams we experience the what could be. the thought that we are learning and growing in this life by actually experiencing the x amount of lives we live in other dimensions while our physical self lays dormant in the one we are bound to is pretty interesting. and that our brains actually evolved to make use of that data meaningful even more so. perhaps we are experiencing but a dream of another version of ourselves when we are awake
I’m not sure if dreaming is the right word here, but the recent ML model Dreamer v3 [0] “dreams”. This is more akin to thinking ahead since it’s really just predicting outcomes using its world model.
It’s possible they could try training the model on some hallucinated scenarios to avoid over fitting, but I’m no ML researcher.
So this is interesting. It’s not like this pseudo-randomization of inputs is necessarily a good thing because you’re actually introducing non-reality into the brain (like dreaming I’m in prison or can fly) but instead we’re being prepared for possibilities so that I can wake up and think, “what if that actually had happened?” Still, not sure if this is a productive thing at this stage in human existence or not, i.e. do I need to train for if I could fly or should I focus on reality?
> do I need to train for if I could fly or should I focus on reality?
I believe the answer is yes, you need to leave reality sometimes to undersrand reality. It is a very general pattern, to understand something you need to move out of it.
You cannot see a forest while being in the forest, because trees are obscuring your sight.
You cannot prove all true statements in arithmetic system without extending it. For example it is impossible to find a general solution for a cubic equation in real numbers, you need to go imaginary, find imaginary roots and toss away not real ones. The remaining roots will be real roots of real cubic equation.
You cannot understand limitations of a scientific theory without considering an alternative theory. (Or a more general, or a narrower theory)
You cannot prove hypothesis without disproving an alternative one.
This pattern is everywhere. So it wouldn't surprise me a bit, if it turned out that you cannot digest a real experience without getting some unreal experience as well.
Does this explain why like 1/4 of my dreams involve me jumping into water with my cell phone in my pocket? I need to be prepared in case I get near water?
I'm not sure this is a new idea as much as it is a new analogy. It might be useful to some segment of people but I'm not sure it's better than the existing idea of just being conditioned to some stimuli/pattern and dreams being a way to explore new ideas.
Perhaps they're merely scrambled bits of memories and thoughts that are being reprogrammed when we sleep and sometimes our "self" gets a peek at the sausage being made?
I have wondered this too. What if dreams are a side-effect of a maintenance process, like if you were always kind and rewind your VHS but choose to watch them while doing so.
Also occurred to me (thanks to chatGPT) that dreams might be produced in the same way chatGPT produces narratives, by running through a series of "what is likely to be next according to my trained network" decisions
Psychedelics can give a taste of this with the experience of separation of self, where it feels like you're an observer behind the one way mirror watching a focus group deliberate on various topics.
This is a common misstatement of evolution. Evolution is not directional and doesn't care whether a change is good, bad, or just completely useless. Evolution is nearly tautological: traits that result in entities being able to breed more, tend to get carried along. Traits that result in entities breeding less, tend to not get carried along.
Intelligence is a great example. It's obviously beneficial for both survival and reproduction, so should naturally be highly selected for. But in a society where higher intelligence correlates with lower reproduction, evolution will "select" for lower intelligence. Of course it's not evolution selecting for anything, but our own traits paired against our own outcomes. If it turns out to be beneficial for breeding, we could gradually even "devolve." But the notion of devolution is again somewhat nonsensical, because evolution has no direction.
So for many things I think looking for an evolutionary cause is not really meaningful. If evolution had a direction, we'd all be tardigrades.
Well, yes, sleeping! Our brains have to do something while we sleep, but to assume that "something* has a functional purpose seems like a possibility, not a forgone conclusion.
> Dreaming remains a mystery to neuroscience. While various hypotheses of why brains evolved nightly dreaming have been put forward, many of these are contradicted by the sparse, hallucinatory, and narrative nature of dreams
Dreams are your subconsciousness asking you, the consciousness, about different scenarios or problems it can think of. That is the most obvious explanation to me. When you are awake then disturbing you could be dangerous, so that has to happen when you sleep. And since you the consciousness has to answer those questions you will experience them as fragments, ie "dreams".
I don't see why dreams would have to be more complicated than that. It is very simple and explains everything.
"Subconscious" is not a well defined technical term in psychology anymore, and hasn't been used since the days of Freud when nothing was well-defined anyway. And even Freud regretted his use of the term:
"If someone talks of subconsciousness, I cannot tell whether he means the term topographically – to indicate something lying in the mind beneath consciousness – or qualitatively – to indicate another consciousness, a subterranean one, as it were. He is probably not clear about any of it. The only trustworthy antithesis is between conscious and unconscious."
The "unconscious" is not understood as being a "hidden consciousness" with its own agency. It's simply understood as the collection of processes in the brain that you are not consciously aware of. All sorts of sensory processing and integration. Things like balance, the syncing of visual and auditory inputs. It's like the brain's standard library.
There's very little support for the idea of some sort of dialogue between conscious and unconscious.
The name doesn't matter, but it is a fact that there are processes that we don't control that are very intelligent in our brain. They can find their way home, or drive your car etc, without you having to think about driving or where to go, you just zone out and before you realize it you are home.
Any assumption that such a process doesn't exist is therefore disproven immediately, we know that none of those can be true. So, since we know that such a process exists, it asking us questions just like we ask it questions seems like a very useful property to have to handle all sorts of bookkeeping and learning. It is a very obvious mechanic in a brain containing two intelligent systems interacting so tightly as these two does.
The name doesn't matter, but it is a fact that there are processes that we don't control that are very intelligent in our brain.
Let me point that "we don't control" and "in your brain" is a contradiction somehow. If it's in your brain, it's you. I'd simply say "you are your brain" and call it a day. A programmer metaphor: you start a thread that acts more or less on its own and never really dumps result to the main thread or registers its course in the memory, but it doesn't mean that it's "another you" in the brain.
Sometimes you wake up at night and then never remember that moment, it doesn't settle in the memory, unless something happens that keeps you awaken, the you do remember the moment. My point is that what surfaces and gets recalled it's not you and then there's "another intelligent system" with different rules, just a subsystem that most of the time is unattended.
So you can fall asleep whenever you want? You never spend minutes lying in bed trying to sleep but being unable to? Otherwise no, you aren't in control of your brain, your brain is in control of you. It decides when you get to compute and experience things, you don't get to, if it wants you to work you work, if it wants you to sleep you sleep, you aren't in control.
Your mistake is considering "you" as just the part that consciously decides. There's no brain and you, there's just you (or just the brain, it's the same thing). You and your brain is one thing, not two.
In other words, I can fall asleep whenever I want. But "I" (and my brain) is not just my conscious/speaking layer. The whole layer stack needs to want it and put it to practice.
It's the same with any other activity, just that for most there's less disagreement between parts of the layer stack. E.g. we can usually speak anytime "we" want. But an autistic person going non-verbal finds that they can't speak, even if their (what-you-call "I") thinking/top-layer wants it.
>There's no brain and you, there's just you (or just the brain, it's the same thing). You and your brain is one thing, not two.
This is only true if you equate "self" with "body", which is a fairly narrow assertion that breaks down quickly when confronted with the complex reality of human experience (e.g. dissociation [0]).
Even the "conscious you" is not really a discrete entity when it comes to self-perception. There are many useful approaches in psychology that regard that "conscious you" as being a composition of a team of several things with differing motivations [1].
This is only true if you equate "self" with "body", which is a fairly narrow assertion that breaks down quickly when confronted with the complex reality of human experience (e.g. dissociation [0]).
Are you suggesting that dissociation involves something outside the body?
Because otherwise what happens --and it's clear in the [0] link you provide-- is that a part of the brain struggle to connect with the rest. That doesn't mean that there is more than one you, but that you suffer a condition that fragments your brain work.
That happens in serious mental illness, also in altered states, see "K-Hole" induced by ketamine. But it's more of "you" disconnected from the perception.
If you take a moment to review the whole thread, not just the immediate comment above the one you're responding to, you'll see that it was started with a mention to subconscious as described by Freud in his early works. The objection to that has been that it's not a concept that's commonly accepted now in that precise form, because it suggests that there is another personality inside your mind, similarly structured as the main consciousness.
The first comment says that the "subsconscious ask the conscious self", or something like that, that implies a rational actor following a strategy to confront the ego, a different structure.
We still know little of the brain working, but it seems to be a massively parallel computing process, with the perception being the glue that composes our reality and keeping us "sane" and focused.
>Are you suggesting that dissociation involves something outside the body?
No. I'm saying that a singular body does not imply or require a singular "self", which can be demonstrated via dissociation.
>That doesn't mean that there is more than one you, but that you suffer a condition that fragments your brain work.
If each fragment can have a discrete and unique experience of reality, then why can't each one can be thought of as a separate 'you'?
>That happens in serious mental illness, also in altered states
Maybe it's not about "suffering a condition" or mental illness at all, and more commonplace than we may realize. We pathologize far too much. The experiences we believe are the result of "altered states" may actually be quite common.
>We still know little of the brain working, but it seems to be a massively parallel computing process, with the perception being the glue that composes our reality and keeping us "sane" and focused.
Without delving into the debate around brain-as-a-computer, I think I get the general idea of what you're saying and I somewhat agree.
However, my argument is that even this overarching perception itself is not necessarily singular. We seem to mostly collect and normalize these discrete perceptions (or parallel processes) into what seems like a single stream, but delving deeper reveals that this composition is not nearly as seamless & continuous as one may believe.
However, my argument is that even this overarching perception itself is not necessarily singular.
We agree completely on that. I love when I catch some falling object on the fly and it feels instantaneous, asynchronous, as if someone else was doing it, specially when it's done through a series of very fast bounces. Or playing piano with both hands, each doing its part. It's possible to feel both or none.
But anyway, my objection is not to defend a monolithic self, but against more than one self. Actually, original subconscious theory seems less tollerant of a parallel, multithreaded mind: "if something can be done without the complete control of the ego, it must be because there is another consistent, self-contained structure in there with its own will" while accepting that the mind is not necessarily centralized could explain the same observations.
> You may feel the presence of two or more people talking or living inside your head, and you may feel as though you're possessed by other identities. Each identity may have a unique name, personal history and characteristics, including obvious differences in voice, gender, mannerisms and even such physical qualities as the need for eyeglasses.
That some experience this failure modality in how the brain/mind works does suggest in some cases there's more to consciousness than that reductive explanation you've given.
>As the other commenter states, are you not aware identity dissociative disorders are a thing?
These are irrelevant in the context of the discussion and the argument being made.
That "you may feel the presence of two or more people [or intelligences] talking or living inside your head" does not mean "two or more people" indeed live inside your head.
Same way as if you feel that your neighbor "is satan" or that "everybody is out to get you" doesn't make it true. It's a failure mode of one brain, not a proof of two (or more) brains.
So people who say "I couldn't fall asleep" are misleading? What they should have said is "I didn't want to fall asleep", is that what you mean? To me that seems to be very different from how most people think and reason about this. To most people "I" are the parts they control, the rest they talk about as if it was something else.
>So people who say "I couldn't fall asleep" are misleading? What they should have said is "I didn't want to fall asleep", is that what you mean?
No, I meant that whether they wanted it or not at the "top layer" (the conscious "I") is irrelevant, the whole brain stack needs to "want it" (or at least, a big enough chunk of it, so that it's put to action).
>To most people "I" are the parts they control, the rest they talk about as if it was something else.
Of course, but most people are not trying to be precise and reason about their brain workings, the way conginitive science or TFA does. They just use whatever simplified mental model is handy, accuracy be damned.
People also historically believed that "I" is the "soul" too...
'They can find their way home, or drive your car etc, without you having to think about driving or where to go, you just zone out and before you realize it you are home.'
Every weekend I do a 12 mile walk, mostly rural roadside with little traffic.
At one crossing point, a week ago, a couple in a vehicle stopped me and asked if I realized that I had just wandered across the road without looking and they had almost run me other.
I explained that I was totally oblivious, had not heard their vehicle approaching and thanked them for them their concern.
Today, halfway across the road, I just realized that I was doing the exact same thing at more or less the exact same point.
I wonder now if my subconscious is trying to kill me?
The name matters a lot if you want to clearly communicate your ideas.
Your use of terminology leaves so many possible interpretations that it's hard to know exactly what you're trying to communicate. Which makes meaningful discussion nigh-on impossible.
What name would you use instead? Subconsciousness is the only name I know that describes the computations in the brain that we aren't consciously aware of.
"hidden consciousness" and similar implies that these computations are conscious, that is an assumption we don't have to make here. All that is required is that the process has some reason to invoke the consciousness to get back some data about some scenario. The fact that the process is smart doesn't mean that it has to be conscious, that is just something you made up here, it is a much weaker statement than what I made.
It's not something I just made up. It's an extremely common misconception about what the
*UNCONSCIOUS*
is. Moreover, the way you imprecisely use ill-defined phrases like "subconsciousness", "asking questions", etc gives a very strong impression that you're talking about some outdated, pseudoscientific conception of the unconscious mind as a conscious, distinct entity.
You can't be so imprecise and just expect people to understand what you mean. Especially if you don't even read the replies.
"UNCONSCIOUS" would imply that it isn't conscious. I wouldn't rule that out either. Would I really have to go through and refute every single point, I think that just communicating the general idea should make you understand why the rest doesn't work.
Edit: And "asking questions" is just a more natural language way to say "invoking a function to get a result". It wants to compute something that the consciousness is good at computing, like where to go or what to do in scenarios. Exactly why etc, that is very hard to answer for such an intelligent process, we don't even know why it decides to turn the wheel at exact moments etc, trying to answer why it asks specific questions is even harder than that. So, the way these psychologists approach it, trying to think of it as a simple function with simple rules, will never ever work.
>The name doesn't matter, but it is a fact that there are processes that we don't control that are very intelligent in our brain. They can find their way home, or drive your car etc, without you having to think about driving or where to go, you just zone out and before you realize it you are home.
What makes you think this points to "intelligent processes" (in the sense of processes having intelligence)?
It just points to some processing being done in the background, and some processing reaching the top layer ("conscious"). But "thinking "is the totality of it, not just the top layer.
It is intelligent enough to learn how to operate a car and navigate complex environments with other actors in it. To me that is enough to call it intelligent, how much intelligence do you want to see in a process before you start calling it intelligent?
It is intelligent enough to learn how to operate a car...
You are identifying "subconscious" as in "I did it without minding it" with "subconscious" as a structured personality inside your mind with autonomous will and reasoning.
When you learn to do something physical, like driving or playing the piano, you start with a strong conscious focus in what you're doing, until you have it automated and, once you have it totally mastered, you send it to the background.
That's a very different story from a whole "you", different from the "regular you", thinking rationally inside your mind and making all the things that you don't feel you're doing with your full attention.
And yes, there are unconscious processes that influence behaviour, only they're not organized the same way the conscious part is. At least, that's the conclusion I take from what I've read on the subject. Are modern researchers right and Freud wrong? I tend to think so, because they have a hundred years more evidence.
Did the chip learn to decode videos based on trial and error, or seeing examples? Otherwise I don't see how what you said is relevant here. Our genes don't know how to drive cars, but our subconsciousness still can do it with practice, driving cars isn't coded into humans, it is emergent behaviour.
Well, the subconsciouss didn't learn it by itself either, we taught ourselves how to drive by conscious learning (like, you know, getting driving lessons and passing our licesnse exams). Then we can use that learned behavior on autopilot, but that's another thing.
I’m much more inclined to believe that dreams are pure System 1 stuff and essentially what we perceive is just how it feels inside when the part of the brain that thinks it’s in charge is 100% riding shotgun and the part that’s the actual driver is doing whatever dreams are for. Especially given that dreams are mostly the polar opposite of what System 2 is good at.
This hypothesis is at least as good as yours, and requires fewer assumptions.
For the record, I’m also very inclined to believe that even in the waking life the “conscious mind” has vastly less command authority than it likes to think, mostly receiving “executive memos” when the actual decision has already been made by the faster parts of the brain.
While we're posting conjecture. I believe dreams are just hallucinations due to chemicals that the brain uses to wash and reset itself every night. The dream itself is the remnants of your conscious mind trying to make sense of the state of hallucination it is in.
It is as if there is something damaging about the accumulation of memories, both micro (cellular, nervous) and macro (brain memory), that is incompatible with the way animals evolved.
I believe we would see similar negative effects of why we need sleep if we tried to replicate it without the actual rest, or if human brains were able to survive on long passed 100 years.
But that can't be it, daydreaming also happens where the subconsciousness takes over even when you are awake. Daydreams doesn't do that washing.
But we do know that our subconsciousness can learn to drive or to walk home etc, since we can do that without thinking about it. It has to learn those things somehow, and asking our consciousness about how all the things works, how to react or think about things when we sleep, that is the obvious ways for it to learn and test things from its control. I don't believe you can run the consciousness functions without us remembering it in some way, and that becomes the dreams.
Edit: Maybe the hard part to understand is that people don't want to imagine themselves as a small part of a larger system. We aren't the main thing in control of ourselves, instead there is something that can shut us down, turn us up, invoke parts of us at will etc, that is in control. It just reuses some of the code that runs our consciousness to run other evaluations.
Isn’t that incompatible by the very nature that we are aware of our daydreams? I.e., it can’t be subconscious if we’re aware of it. Perhaps you mean daydreaming is when subconscious thoughts transition to conscious awareness?
I think this is part of what the other commenter was alluding to with imprecise language.
> Isn’t that incompatible by the very nature that we are aware of our daydreams? I.e., it can’t be subconscious if we’re aware of it. Perhaps you mean daydreaming is when subconscious thoughts transition to conscious awareness?
I don't see how that is different from you being aware of your dreams. Daydreams aren't controlled by you, there is another process you aren't aware of that is feeding you the daydream. Also usually when you daydream you stop being aware of your surroundings, like when walking etc, so some process has to take over that as well. I'm talking about those processes.
That’s the point. I believe neuroscientists don’t consider all dreaming to be “subconscious”.
By definition, if they were, you wouldn’t be aware of them and wouldn’t remember them. Lots of people dream (and it can be verified with brain scans) without remembering them.
> I believe neuroscientists don’t consider all dreaming to be “subconscious”.
Can you consciously start to dream whenever you want? Otherwise I'd say that they are invoked by a subconscious process.
Also forgetting something doesn't mean that the memory was never there. Even people who remember their dream directly after the night usually quickly forgets about them afterwards, you don't remember most of your dreams from a week ago, so that is easily explained by just saying that they cleaned up the memory of their dream before they woke up.
But dreaming involves the conscious mind - in that while dreaming, your conscious awareness has been switched into operating in another mode, playing back some internally generated scenario, rather than interacting with the external world.
I think you’re conflating concepts like free will and consciousness. I can be conscious of a sound without willing the experience into existence. You’d have to act some of the lucid dreaming folks about the limitations of consciously directing dreams.
> You’d have to act some of the lucid dreaming folks about the limitations of consciously directing dreams
I'm very good at that though, as I said it is just a process that is asking you questions, and just like you can steer a conversation with what you say you can steer where that process takes the dream by how you behave in it. It will continue asking you about the stuff until it is no longer curious about the situation, and when it is it will steer the dream (conversation) to some other subject, putting you in some completely different environment etc.
I'm not sure why that interpretation is so hard to believe. And I think that process also does a lot of computation that doesn't need to ask the conscious parts about anything, in those cases you wouldn't dream, its just doing something else.
Occasionally I too have this ability to "wake up" within a dream and thus exert at least some form of influence over it, such as an ability to fly around the dreamscape. I even came up with a system to reliably verify whether or not I was indeed in a dream state. It's very simple actually. The first thing I do is look around for something with writing on it. Having done that I then turn my head and then back. If the wording has changed, I am dreaming. If I don't do something like that, I fall back into the "subconscious dreaming state" much faster than I would have than otherwise.
It’s not that the conjecture is hard to believe, it’s that it’s being muddled by sloppy language.
If, as you say, you are aware of something, it is by definition now in your conscious mind. The idea that it originates somewhere else is not a new concept. Buddhists have been claiming “thoughts think themselves” for a long time.
There is no precise language for this though, and if I clarified everything the comment would be too long so nobody would read it. By spreading out people asking for clarification like this we actually get to talk about it in a natural way.
> If, as you say, you are aware of something, it is by definition now in your conscious mind
Yeah, but that is a trivial statement, we all know that "thoughts popping into our head" means that they came from somewhere, I'm not talking about that effect.
To me the difference is like between a function call and a process. The dream is some other part of the brain that wants to know something that you are good at answering, so it asks you that question by posing it in a language you understand, ie the "dream", and then you answer by reacting to the dream, it isn't waking you up it is just making a quick invocation. This is different than what you are talking about, unless I misunderstood you completely.
When you are awake it is more that you are querying the other systems and they put thoughts in your mind as responses. Those responses will be calculated before you are aware of them, creating the "you made the choice before you think you did" effect, but you are still querying them. While when you dream those systems query you and you answer back with your reaction to the dream, meaning you have basically no control at all, and the shape and feel of the dream, when to dream, what to dream etc is decided entirely by that other part.
Or in other words, "dreaming" would be the feeling of being the subsystem others are querying, while "awake" is the feeling of being the main system that is querying others. And just like you ask your subsystems a lot of questions for all sort of reasons, I don't see why our other systems would have just one reason to ask us anything, they probably ask all sort of things for all sort of reasons, as long as querying you for information is useful to them they will do it.
Ok, but your description belies something different than what I’m saying.
What exactly do you mean by “being” when you talk of “being the subsystem”? What I’m relating is that the very act of “being” (I.e., having a subjective experience) is rooted in the conscious mind. So there’s a natural contradiction that you are somehow “being” the subconscious, because the subconscious is “below conscious experience.” Maybe you have a different definition of subconscious which is why I keep pushing on getting away from wishy-washy usage of the terminology.
that doesn't explain everything. why would you subconsciousness ask anything to begin with? amazing how people state things like it's an absolute fact based on absolutely nothing.
> why would you subconsciousness ask anything to begin with?
Because it is learning? If you had this supersmart function that could evaluate situations, why not ask it things when you are training another algorithm that tries to evaluate things cheaper?
What you're proposing is a dialog between a conscious and subconscious self, while in a dream state, where one or the other (or both) forms of being are fully aware of what questions to ask, and what the answers to those questions are. This doesn't sound simple. It sounds extremely complex.
And it doesn't explain everything, like, for example, why some people don't dream or can't remember their dreams. Or why other animals dream, unless all animals have a conscious and subconscious self and are attempting to resolve internal conflict.
> unless all animals have a conscious and subconscious
You don't believe animals have a conscious? I thought all humans believes that a dog for example had a consciousness.
> What you're proposing is a dialog between a conscious and subconscious self, while in a dream state, where one or the other (or both) forms of being are fully aware of what questions to ask
You say this is complex, but there is definitely a subroutine that determines when you should sleep, when to wake you up etc. That routine calling you to do some bookkeeping while you are sleeping doesn't add any complexity at all. I don't see why that routine would be smart enough to do everything else, but not smart enough to ask some questions about things when you sleep...
I think it’s a matter of degree. We don’t know what level of consciousness they have relative to our own experience. Can you say with certainty, for example, that a mollusk or sea cucumber has conscious experience?
>Dreams are your subconsciousness asking you, the consciousness, about different scenarios or problems it can think of. That is the most obvious explanation to me.
One can't explain the workings of the brain as some Q&A between "conscious" and "unconscious" except as a high level abstraction/metaphor. Else this implies two tiny "thinking" entities inside your brain, where one asks another something.
The most credible explanation to me -- and one that makes logical sense, is that dreaming is about processing the day's events -- possibly for learning, or committing to memory (same thing basically?).
Since hearing about this theory, I've been able to pin point my dreams 90% of the time to themes that were discussed or experienced during the day I fell asleep. Including topics I had only worried about but never mentioned to anyone.
Being "stuck in a rut," having depression or PTSD, or just being uncreative could be symptoms of the brain having overfit to some past set of stimuli.