8 Steps In A Dream

In this thread here, I wrote about the 8 steps you can take with your eyes closed while your mind pretends it can still see. I think this is similar to a dream state, because the mind is creating the vision for you.

And that's what I want to talk about, as in... holy shit. The mind is not merely interpreting our senses. The mind can provide those senses... as we see in vivid dreams. The mind is essentially talking to itself, seeing the world and being the world at the same time. This goes well beyond memory, which is simply a matter of recording sensations and then playing them back. And even memory changes things.

Surely dreams and memories show us that the mind has a facility for creating reality, a reality factory. Whenever I hear about artificial intelligence, the attempt to mimic the human mind, this never comes up. Instead, they only talk about interpreting reality. Maybe the only way to interpret reality is to create it.

My theory is that the reason dreams and memories come so readily to us is because the mind is damn near close to creating reality even when it's supposedly just interpreting it. Seeing something new, like the ocean for the first time, can be overwhelming because the mind has no reality to impose on it. Those are the only moments when we are truly seeing, truly sensing the world in a passive way, yet they are considered epiphanies, holy visions.

Art tries to do that, I think: wake us from our dream. But the dream is necessary for life. The more things covered by the dream-blanket the more we can focus on whatever truly needs our attention. Dream-blanket? Stay with me here. Look at something. Look at your computer. Now close your eyes, and you can still see it. Your mind is now creating it. Open your eyes again and try to see both computers at once, the one that you're seeing and the one that you're creating.

I think this is why they can make a machine who can beat Kasparov at chess, but not a machine that can make breakfast. Interacting with the world is an incredibly complex endeavor, requiring layers of ideas and stored knowledge acting and interacting simultaneously. The mind controls as much of it as possible. That's why when you open the utensil drawer and there are no forks left, you stare blankly for a few moments. You have to readjust your created world to momentarily match the real one.

And that's why we have dreams. Not for any holy or psychological reason, but simply because we have a reality factory in our heads that doesn't need us to be aware or even conscious to keep chugging along, pumping out worlds. What's of use to psychologists is to see what realities are chosen, how they are warped, and how they are interpreted by the waking mind.