It surely seems improbable that most of people in the 1920s were dreaming black and white while today 80% dream in color.
Why? Do you know what causes people to dream in color? Is this change less probable than 50%+ of the population being incapable of remembering with any accuracy an event that happens several times a week?
I don’t know the cause, and I don’t know the relative odds. But if your claim is that people are systematically making a large and serious error, I think you need more than broad population comparisons with a complete absence of mechanism. There is not a sufficiently direct contradiction to infer that people are collectively mistaken; I’m assuming that’s why Lukeprog didn’t actually connect the dots—because the evidence doesn’t support dot-connecting.
I don’t know what causes colours in dreams, but my expectation is that the causes are mostly biological, rather than cultural. My experience: I haven’t noticed any significant change in perceptual qualities of my dreams in my life, although the contents of the dreams changed a lot. I suppose thus that while the topic of dreams may be strongly influenced by our daylight experiences (and the cultural environment in general), the low-level facts about dreams, such as their duration, colour and sound are rather biological. They may be influenced by diseases, drugs, perhaps meditation practices and such, but I am quite skeptical that watching black and white (or, on the other hand, coloured) movies could do that (this is the only mechanism I could think about now).
Also, I am not entirely sure whether my dreams are coloured (and whether they have sound, for that matter). I can remember having only one dream where colour was salient—it was a rather nightmarish dream perhaps 20 years ago about an asteroid coming to destroy the Earth, and the asteroid was red—and still I am not much sure whether it actually was red inside the dream, or whether the idea of its redness emerged by later thought. I haven’t noticed a particular colour-related fact in any other dream. On the other hand, when I wake up from dreams (and sometimes even inside the dream), I find the dream-world very strange and inconsistent, but never because of its colour. So my ability to distinguish between coloured and black and white dreams is pretty weak, which contributes to my estimate that it is fairly probable to misreport that, especially when answering a brief binary question of “do you have colour dreams”?
Finally, I attach a non-negligible probability to the possibility that the dream qualia are very different from the daylight ones, and that all colour perceptions are created after waking up after trying to remember the dream and describe it in terms of the daylight qualia (not sure whether this statement has some sense empirically, but that’s true for most of this discussion).
So it is true that lukeprog’s H1= “people misremember the subjective qualities of their dreams” isn’t the only explanation of the data, since there is H2= “the average subjective qualities of dreams change in time”, and I agree that I have little evidence to support my opinion that p(H2 ) < p(H1). But neither you have strong evidence to the contrary, and since the data strongly support H1 or H2, they support (less strongly) H1.
my expectation is that the causes are mostly biological, rather than cultural.
My expectation is that you’ve been moving through different cultures at a rate comparable to the one at which you’ve been moving through different biologies. This is a rather enormous problem with most “X must be biological” claims, particularly as applied to individual anecdotes.
Bigger picture, this all adds up to a memory error, assuming all claims in your favor. This is particularly unsurprising in the area of dreams where our memory isn’t really supposed to work—you dream several times per night, but most of these dreams are not stored in accessible memory. Your argument seems to be that people are actually experiencing dreams in color, but incorrectly remembering them as being non-color. My point may seem trivial, but this remains a memory error, not an error of subjective experience. Memory errors are extremely common, so that they occur in memories of subjective experience is no surprise. It’s just like remembering that you liked a movie when, it turns out, you really didn’t (and, say, emailed someone to that effect).
It could even be a language error—dreams do not involve light and, in a sense, can’t be in color. As another commenter has pointed out, they don’t experience dreams like movies, but rather as concepts. I personally don’t experience faces in dreams—I know who people are as part of the narrative, but they often lack detailed faces (or fail to look like themselves). Dream perception is not that much like conscious perception—at least for many—so using life-describing words may lead to serious error, just like the circle/ellipse question with a coin is principally one of language. Dreams are complex and impossible to directly reflect on and perhaps did not evolve to be remembered, so pointing out that people have trouble describing them doesn’t really seem to be relevant.
My expectation is that you’ve been moving through different cultures at a rate comparable to the one at which you’ve been moving through different biologies.
Since my childhood I have encountered new technologies, most importantly computers and the internet, learned several foreign languages, changed my political opinions, moved to a different country and learned about cognitive biases, which strongly reshaped my thinking. If this doesn’t cause a change in dream colour, why a culture change, of magnitude comparable to changes in the Western culture during the last 80 years, should do? I acknowledge the prominence of black and white movies then, as pointed out by JoshuaZ, but should that effect be so strong? Do you have some other cultural mechanism in mind?
Overall, I probably don’t understand your point. Do you say that I can’t assume with reasonable certainty (95% or so) that the colour of dreams cannot be strongly culturally influenced? If so, I don’t disagree—I am willing to accept a 50% estimate on that, given that the black and white movie bit is a fair point. Or do you say that you are reasonably certain that colour of dreams can be culturally influenced? If so, what evidence supports that?
My point may seem trivial, but this remains a memory error, not an error of subjective experience. … It could even be a language error—dreams do not involve light and, in a sense, can’t be in color.
How does this not entail being mistaken about our experiences? A false belief about colour of one’s dreams doesn’t cease to be false when it is caused by memory failure. If there is actually no sense in speaking about color in dreams, it becomes rather “not even false”, but still remains an error. The original article did claim nothing more than that we can hold false beliefs about our experiences. Whether the mechanism behind those errors is a memory error, language confusion or something else is irrelevant.
How does this not entail being mistaken about our experiences?
Suppose I believe I had chicken for lunch yesterday, when in fact I had pork. That does not mean that, when I had lunch, I actually thought pork tasted like chicken (or, I subjectively experienced the taste of chicken when I actually subjectively experienced the taste of pork—this convolution is my issue with the concept). If the point is, “Sometimes our memory is incorrect,” it seems to be wholly uninteresting and hardly worthy of a top-level post—as it adds little insight to this established fact.
On your earlier point: have your dreams changed, qualitatively, since you were a child? How would you even know? Unless you kept rather detailed diaries, then compared them to a large sample of other people to control for age-related changes, it’d be impossible to tell. Moreover, however complex your cultural upbringing, you had one cultural upbringing (perhaps a multicultural one, but one upbringing). Populations do not experience muti-cultural upbringings, they experience different cultural upbringings.
My point is that attaching percentages to probabilities here is largely an exercise in futility. You are using a piece of evidence to fit into a large claim—we can be mistaken about our subjective experiences. Fact X isn’t either evidence for Y or not-Y; the vast majority of the time Fact X doesn’t really have much bearing one way or another. In short, it’s very weak evidence for a highly specific (and, as I’ve argued, incoherent) proposition. I’ll happily concede that some people may dream in color and not remember this (or vice versa), but
If 80% of people were systematically forgetting overnight what they had for lunch the day before, it would certainly be interesting and worthy of a top-level post.
True. But, if in a 1930 80% of people reported eating chicken at their last meal, and in 1990 80% said they had pork at their last meal, we would not assume that there was an error in their first-person experience without significant additional evidence. That’s precisely what is missing here.
Why? Do you know what causes people to dream in color? Is this change less probable than 50%+ of the population being incapable of remembering with any accuracy an event that happens several times a week?
I don’t know the cause, and I don’t know the relative odds. But if your claim is that people are systematically making a large and serious error, I think you need more than broad population comparisons with a complete absence of mechanism. There is not a sufficiently direct contradiction to infer that people are collectively mistaken; I’m assuming that’s why Lukeprog didn’t actually connect the dots—because the evidence doesn’t support dot-connecting.
I don’t know what causes colours in dreams, but my expectation is that the causes are mostly biological, rather than cultural. My experience: I haven’t noticed any significant change in perceptual qualities of my dreams in my life, although the contents of the dreams changed a lot. I suppose thus that while the topic of dreams may be strongly influenced by our daylight experiences (and the cultural environment in general), the low-level facts about dreams, such as their duration, colour and sound are rather biological. They may be influenced by diseases, drugs, perhaps meditation practices and such, but I am quite skeptical that watching black and white (or, on the other hand, coloured) movies could do that (this is the only mechanism I could think about now).
Also, I am not entirely sure whether my dreams are coloured (and whether they have sound, for that matter). I can remember having only one dream where colour was salient—it was a rather nightmarish dream perhaps 20 years ago about an asteroid coming to destroy the Earth, and the asteroid was red—and still I am not much sure whether it actually was red inside the dream, or whether the idea of its redness emerged by later thought. I haven’t noticed a particular colour-related fact in any other dream. On the other hand, when I wake up from dreams (and sometimes even inside the dream), I find the dream-world very strange and inconsistent, but never because of its colour. So my ability to distinguish between coloured and black and white dreams is pretty weak, which contributes to my estimate that it is fairly probable to misreport that, especially when answering a brief binary question of “do you have colour dreams”?
Finally, I attach a non-negligible probability to the possibility that the dream qualia are very different from the daylight ones, and that all colour perceptions are created after waking up after trying to remember the dream and describe it in terms of the daylight qualia (not sure whether this statement has some sense empirically, but that’s true for most of this discussion).
So it is true that lukeprog’s H1= “people misremember the subjective qualities of their dreams” isn’t the only explanation of the data, since there is H2= “the average subjective qualities of dreams change in time”, and I agree that I have little evidence to support my opinion that p(H2 ) < p(H1). But neither you have strong evidence to the contrary, and since the data strongly support H1 or H2, they support (less strongly) H1.
My expectation is that you’ve been moving through different cultures at a rate comparable to the one at which you’ve been moving through different biologies. This is a rather enormous problem with most “X must be biological” claims, particularly as applied to individual anecdotes.
Bigger picture, this all adds up to a memory error, assuming all claims in your favor. This is particularly unsurprising in the area of dreams where our memory isn’t really supposed to work—you dream several times per night, but most of these dreams are not stored in accessible memory. Your argument seems to be that people are actually experiencing dreams in color, but incorrectly remembering them as being non-color. My point may seem trivial, but this remains a memory error, not an error of subjective experience. Memory errors are extremely common, so that they occur in memories of subjective experience is no surprise. It’s just like remembering that you liked a movie when, it turns out, you really didn’t (and, say, emailed someone to that effect).
It could even be a language error—dreams do not involve light and, in a sense, can’t be in color. As another commenter has pointed out, they don’t experience dreams like movies, but rather as concepts. I personally don’t experience faces in dreams—I know who people are as part of the narrative, but they often lack detailed faces (or fail to look like themselves). Dream perception is not that much like conscious perception—at least for many—so using life-describing words may lead to serious error, just like the circle/ellipse question with a coin is principally one of language. Dreams are complex and impossible to directly reflect on and perhaps did not evolve to be remembered, so pointing out that people have trouble describing them doesn’t really seem to be relevant.
Since my childhood I have encountered new technologies, most importantly computers and the internet, learned several foreign languages, changed my political opinions, moved to a different country and learned about cognitive biases, which strongly reshaped my thinking. If this doesn’t cause a change in dream colour, why a culture change, of magnitude comparable to changes in the Western culture during the last 80 years, should do? I acknowledge the prominence of black and white movies then, as pointed out by JoshuaZ, but should that effect be so strong? Do you have some other cultural mechanism in mind?
Overall, I probably don’t understand your point. Do you say that I can’t assume with reasonable certainty (95% or so) that the colour of dreams cannot be strongly culturally influenced? If so, I don’t disagree—I am willing to accept a 50% estimate on that, given that the black and white movie bit is a fair point. Or do you say that you are reasonably certain that colour of dreams can be culturally influenced? If so, what evidence supports that?
How does this not entail being mistaken about our experiences? A false belief about colour of one’s dreams doesn’t cease to be false when it is caused by memory failure. If there is actually no sense in speaking about color in dreams, it becomes rather “not even false”, but still remains an error. The original article did claim nothing more than that we can hold false beliefs about our experiences. Whether the mechanism behind those errors is a memory error, language confusion or something else is irrelevant.
Suppose I believe I had chicken for lunch yesterday, when in fact I had pork. That does not mean that, when I had lunch, I actually thought pork tasted like chicken (or, I subjectively experienced the taste of chicken when I actually subjectively experienced the taste of pork—this convolution is my issue with the concept). If the point is, “Sometimes our memory is incorrect,” it seems to be wholly uninteresting and hardly worthy of a top-level post—as it adds little insight to this established fact.
On your earlier point: have your dreams changed, qualitatively, since you were a child? How would you even know? Unless you kept rather detailed diaries, then compared them to a large sample of other people to control for age-related changes, it’d be impossible to tell. Moreover, however complex your cultural upbringing, you had one cultural upbringing (perhaps a multicultural one, but one upbringing). Populations do not experience muti-cultural upbringings, they experience different cultural upbringings.
My point is that attaching percentages to probabilities here is largely an exercise in futility. You are using a piece of evidence to fit into a large claim—we can be mistaken about our subjective experiences. Fact X isn’t either evidence for Y or not-Y; the vast majority of the time Fact X doesn’t really have much bearing one way or another. In short, it’s very weak evidence for a highly specific (and, as I’ve argued, incoherent) proposition. I’ll happily concede that some people may dream in color and not remember this (or vice versa), but
If 80% of people were systematically forgetting overnight what they had for lunch the day before, it would certainly be interesting and worthy of a top-level post.
True. But, if in a 1930 80% of people reported eating chicken at their last meal, and in 1990 80% said they had pork at their last meal, we would not assume that there was an error in their first-person experience without significant additional evidence. That’s precisely what is missing here.