I think it’s more like “I don’t actually have dreams that include perfectly detailed, perfectly realistic, completely specified visual fields,” “I don’t actually have dreams in which I spend five minutes eating a salad or doing similarly mundane tasks,” “I don’t actually have dreams in which I spend all this time visually inspecting a webpage in all this sensory detail and effortfully introspecting about my experience in order to generate examples to illustrate an abstract idea,” etc. Although I rarely realize it while I’m dreaming, my whole experience of dreaming is actually really different from any given random five-minute snapshot of my daily life.
No, seriously, what you’re saying sounds like nonsese. Number one, dreams can have vivid stimuli that I recall explicitly using as evidence that I wasn’t dreaming; of course I’ve also thought I was performing mundane tasks. Number two, how does dream-you distinguish the difference without having “tested the behavior of written words, or used some other more-or-less reliable test?”
The thing I’m claiming is that (at least for most people) dreams actually feel really different from being awake. The moment-to-moment experience of dreaming isn’t a perfect phenomenological copy-paste of a representative waking experience. (At least, insofar as I’m currently accurately remembering what dreaming is like. But if I’m not accurately remembering, it may be in the direction of overestimating the verisimilitude of my dreams, not just underestimating it.)
The important claim here is that your moment-to-moment sensory experience while awake can be full of features that give you good evidence you’re awake, even if your dreaming self lacks the capacity to recognize that those things are missing while you’re dreaming. Hence:
If a rock wouldn’t be able to use Bayesian inference to learn that it is a rock, still I can use Bayesian inference to learn that I’m not.
The bits of information O that I’m receiving about a salad I’m visually inspecting, about a thought I’m introspecting about while eating a salad, etc. provide Bayesian evidence that I’m not dreaming, ¬dream. That’s not because my dreaming self would have the metacognitive wherewithal to notice the absence of those kinds of bits and to infer dream. It’s because the probability of O given ¬dream is much higher than the probability of O given dream.
The part about sensory data sounds totally wrong to me personally, and of course you know where this is going (see also). Whereas my dream self can, in fact, notice logical flaws or different physics and conclude that I’m dreaming.
Cool, that makes sense of our disagreement! You’re the second person I’ve run into who was puzzled by the dream reductio, and for the same reason: their dreams were very mundane, detailed, and otherwise “realistic,” closely matching waking experiences in sensory feel and content.
That’s actually not quite right—my dream *content* varies widely in how mundane it is. My point is that I learned to recognize dreams not by practicing the thought ‘This experience is too vivid to be a dream,’ but by practicing tests which seemed likely to work.
Good to know. I want to continue to emphasize, though, that talking about “learning to recognize dreams” as a single thing might be the wrong framing. The skills and techniques that work best for “learning to recognize dreams when you’re asleep” may be very different from the skills and techniques that work best for “learning to recognize non-dreams when you’re awake.”
When people in the lucid dreaming community practice reality checks while awake, for example, they’re really trying to train a habit into themselves that they expect to be useful for detecting dreams while they’re sleeping; they’re not earnestly trying to come up with the most efficient possible methods for updating on their sensory and introspective evidence for the ¬dream hypothesis while awake.
(I would claim that this is because they’re not actually uncertain about whether they’re awake, because they’re swimming in an ocean of tiny omnipresent moment-to-moment bits of evidence for ¬dream. In the overwhelming majority of cases, they’re not anxious or curious about the possibility that this is all a dream (nor should they be); they’re going through the motions of running tests in order to have the habit installed when they need it later.)
Like many people in the past year, I frequently wonder if I’m dreaming while awake. This seems to make up >10% of the times I’ve tested it. I’m also running out of ways to say that I mean what I say.
You may be right that the vast majority of the time (meaningful cough) when humans wonder if they’re dreaming, they are. People who know that may account for nearly all exceptions.
I think it’s more like “I don’t actually have dreams that include perfectly detailed, perfectly realistic, completely specified visual fields,” “I don’t actually have dreams in which I spend five minutes eating a salad or doing similarly mundane tasks,” “I don’t actually have dreams in which I spend all this time visually inspecting a webpage in all this sensory detail and effortfully introspecting about my experience in order to generate examples to illustrate an abstract idea,” etc. Although I rarely realize it while I’m dreaming, my whole experience of dreaming is actually really different from any given random five-minute snapshot of my daily life.
No, seriously, what you’re saying sounds like nonsese. Number one, dreams can have vivid stimuli that I recall explicitly using as evidence that I wasn’t dreaming; of course I’ve also thought I was performing mundane tasks. Number two, how does dream-you distinguish the difference without having “tested the behavior of written words, or used some other more-or-less reliable test?”
The thing I’m claiming is that (at least for most people) dreams actually feel really different from being awake. The moment-to-moment experience of dreaming isn’t a perfect phenomenological copy-paste of a representative waking experience. (At least, insofar as I’m currently accurately remembering what dreaming is like. But if I’m not accurately remembering, it may be in the direction of overestimating the verisimilitude of my dreams, not just underestimating it.)
The important claim here is that your moment-to-moment sensory experience while awake can be full of features that give you good evidence you’re awake, even if your dreaming self lacks the capacity to recognize that those things are missing while you’re dreaming. Hence:
The bits of information O that I’m receiving about a salad I’m visually inspecting, about a thought I’m introspecting about while eating a salad, etc. provide Bayesian evidence that I’m not dreaming, ¬dream. That’s not because my dreaming self would have the metacognitive wherewithal to notice the absence of those kinds of bits and to infer dream. It’s because the probability of O given ¬dream is much higher than the probability of O given dream.
The part about sensory data sounds totally wrong to me personally, and of course you know where this is going (see also). Whereas my dream self can, in fact, notice logical flaws or different physics and conclude that I’m dreaming.
Cool, that makes sense of our disagreement! You’re the second person I’ve run into who was puzzled by the dream reductio, and for the same reason: their dreams were very mundane, detailed, and otherwise “realistic,” closely matching waking experiences in sensory feel and content.
That’s actually not quite right—my dream *content* varies widely in how mundane it is. My point is that I learned to recognize dreams not by practicing the thought ‘This experience is too vivid to be a dream,’ but by practicing tests which seemed likely to work.
Good to know. I want to continue to emphasize, though, that talking about “learning to recognize dreams” as a single thing might be the wrong framing. The skills and techniques that work best for “learning to recognize dreams when you’re asleep” may be very different from the skills and techniques that work best for “learning to recognize non-dreams when you’re awake.”
When people in the lucid dreaming community practice reality checks while awake, for example, they’re really trying to train a habit into themselves that they expect to be useful for detecting dreams while they’re sleeping; they’re not earnestly trying to come up with the most efficient possible methods for updating on their sensory and introspective evidence for the ¬dream hypothesis while awake.
(I would claim that this is because they’re not actually uncertain about whether they’re awake, because they’re swimming in an ocean of tiny omnipresent moment-to-moment bits of evidence for ¬dream. In the overwhelming majority of cases, they’re not anxious or curious about the possibility that this is all a dream (nor should they be); they’re going through the motions of running tests in order to have the habit installed when they need it later.)
Like many people in the past year, I frequently wonder if I’m dreaming while awake. This seems to make up >10% of the times I’ve tested it. I’m also running out of ways to say that I mean what I say.
You may be right that the vast majority of the time (meaningful cough) when humans wonder if they’re dreaming, they are. People who know that may account for nearly all exceptions.