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How come if my dream world is created by me, and is essentially all me, when I am in my dreams I still have my sense of individuality and separation from the things and people in it? I can even interact with people and they seem like other people... different from me.

I don't know about you, but when I introspect a little I find that the notion of "self" is not at all a unitary thing.

>>1797 Explain?

>>1798 not him, but the self is an infinite loop of perception, the "if's" and "maybe's" all fall into perception. who you are is really a matter of who you think you are at any given moment. aside from that, your mind operates on several levels, and when you dream, you brain basically pushes huge amounts of data at extremely high speeds in order to sort and archive memories and information consolidated throughout the day. you catch glimpses of the information which have perceived audio visual representations with emotional tags. the self is a consolidation of your perception of the past, present, and future, so your memories play a heavy role in who you as a person are. to say that self is a unitary thing is to say that you are but one static being, but you are really a dynamic composition of many different emotions, conflicting opinions (iirc the average person communicates several hundred words per minute to themselves) which shows that you are ever changing. being ever changing means you are not the same person you were 5 years ago just as much as you are not the same person you were 5 minutes ago.

And has anyone ever had a lucid dream where they "were everything"?

>>1799 Completely agree. But in MY dream, how come I dont feel to be everything and everywhere? There is a duality that exists. I thought about it and like tables and chairs don't think or feel or see, so I'm not sure what being them would entail. But there are people and characters in my dreams, and they dont get a by. I am not them in the dream, but somehow I make them and sometimes even control them through what seems to amount to thoughts wishing for something to happen. I guess another explanation is I am not everything in the dream, but that would seem to indicate that the dream is not mine. But if that's the case... I have no idea what I am or who is dreaming.

>>1800 there is a form of meditation whee you do this. I cannot vouch for people who do this while sleeping, but imagining yourself as "everything" in a meditative state can aid in introspection. i am talking about actual mediation not DUDE WEED LMAO, although I cannot speak for people who partake in the devils lettuce >>1801 you still have some residua self image, how you differentiate yourself from the universe. I think that one of the messages in GitS was where the line is drawn (not just in a transhuman interconnected world) but where the concept of self image begins and ends. The difference in waking and sleeping self image, is that in waking self image, your self perception can be affected by others around you, whereas in sleeping self image, you essentially control both parts of the universe (the self and the environment) regardless of your current awareness/conscious of the fact at the time. if you have sufficient metacognition, you can even magic away bad things by realizing you are in a dream, this often breaks a sort of perception wall that you are not in control of your dreams (but it may also just wake you up) you may find interest in split brain experiments, because the logic and creative parts of the brain do act interdependently to some degree, though the phenomenon and extent is not fully understood

>>1802 I guess what I'm saying is, in a dream I can control other people, but I am not aware in them as I am aware in myself. Why is this the case? I clearly have made them, and I exercise control over them. As for the meditation, I don't doubt that one can understand how they could be everything (that is part of what Zen is about) but I've never heard of anyone who experiences being everything. In waking life this is understandable. But the dream world is mine, so that part is not understandable to me. Does that make sense? Trying to post from omnichan also, but lainchan doesn't like it. I'm OP.

>>1803 Aware in them, as in aware INSIDE of them. And if my awareness were to shift, I still would not be aware INSIDE both or all the people in my dream. If I created and run the world in my dream, why do I have a single point of awareness?

>>1803 >>1804 to be honest, I dont know, and i dont think that research can fully explain the phenomenon. If I had to speculate, I would say because those other people are manifestations of your unreachable subconscious, and you brain remains fixated at a single point (the "you" in the dream) to maintain a sort of reference point for the rest of the dream universe and your internal mind. I wonder if the idea of dreams is the same for asians as westerners, because westerners tend to be object oriented in perception, where Asians tend to be environment centered in perception (see the fish picture experiment)

>>1805 I think it has to be more simple than that. In order for reality to exist in the way we understand it, it must be observed with our senses. If the tree falls in the forest without an ear to hear it, it cannot make a sound because "sound" requires an ear, a vibration, air to carry the vibration, etc to exist. So we create reality by our existence, which consists of our sense perceptions as we experience it. There can be no universe for you without that. This makes things really scary when you consider what turning off your senses brings. There can be nothing. It cannot be perceived. But you wouldn't think either because thought involves a conceptualization of those sense perceptions in the first place. Does the world disappear when I close my eyes? Does the universe collapse on itself? When I try to stabilize my dream by yelling "stabilize" or "increase clarity", who am I talking to? Surely not myself in the dream. But when it happens, who heard it? Who fixed the dream? I've always imagined a higher order of things to exist, something beyond what I immediately see. Math exists. But it is very scary to imagine that a higher order of consciousness may not mean consciousness. In a base reality if my ego disappears, does my ego join with a larger all encompassing ego? Or is there a thing that exists of a higher order than ego? Dreams would seem to indicate the later. It's a really scary thought.

>>1806 your post brings up 2 intersting points. 1. There was an extensive cultural anthropology study with sign language speakers (iirc 3 generations of south american deaf students who had to invent their own language) that showed that language and sensory input heavily influence your perception of the world. people with better language skill are better able to perceive the world as a result, and abstract though directly correlates to ones sensory and linguistic ability. 2. from a religious viewpoint, dreams have a significant structural belief system that relies on external forces, in islam for example, it is believed that when you sleep, your "soul" is held by god, and iirc if he chooses to return it to your body in the morning you will wake, else you will die. you can learn a lot about the psychology of normal self perception by looking at abnormal psychological phenomenon where people do not have good self perception. multiple personality disorder (iirc it is now called disassociate personality disorder), has some of the similar ides to dream perception, because many "people" occupy the same body. in a famous case a kind and nurturing mother had the duality of also being a self destructive party girl, and the nurturing person checked herself into a mental hospital, and the party girl faked being fine to escape. the phenomenon becomes more interesting when people have male/female dualities or more than 3 "selves." Being multi lingual can also affect your dreams, people interacting in one language or another etc.

>>1798 well, what is "you"? Do you ever feel as if you have no conscious control over the vast majority of things you think/say/do? That's because you don't. "you" are actually just a convenient fiction. So for this same reason, "you" are generating dreams yes but in the dream world, there's no longer a meaningful seperation between self and other so your internal incoherence is laid bare.

>>1803 >I can control other people, but I am not aware in them as I am aware in myself. Why is this the case? Because they're not real. If you could actually imagine fully fleshed out people then you could just imagine an infinite number of people trying to solve whatever problem you are working on and have the answer immediately. The best you can do is create hollow* shells by dedicating some portions of your brain to emulating the outward appearance other people. >>1810 During the previous AI bubble (~80s) researchers imagined brains as being like powerful computers for running intelligence that happened to have cameras and microphones and speakers attached. The current AI bubble and successes are the result of gradually realizing that we're really huge signal processing engines for making sense of audiovisual data, and we got so good at it that we could spare a little of it for things like self awareness. Intelligence and perception are tightly linked. * not completely hollow, since there is some bit of your brain controlling them, but far from a full person. I'm not saying there isn't utility in talking to fictions, since they are really parts of your brain you might not use very much but could have some important input.

It's just as when you're awake: you can pretty easily imagine how others will react to the things you say (from experience) but it is a lot harder to imagine how people think and feel. In your dreams your brain is doing what it knows, simulating social interactions and interactions with the world; same as when you're awake. It would be interesting to see if you can retrain your brain to simulate differently, but you would probably need to experience the world differently for quite a while. Until we get some kind of mind-link tech working that'll be difficult. Or you could take a bunch of acid idk.

>>1815 >Until we get some kind of mind-link tech working that'll be difficult. DON'T GIVE THEM IDEAS! >dream MMO with paid DLC and advertising for the free version and servers owned by tech companies

>>1803 The Advayta tradition of Hindu mysticism uses dreaming to illustrate its non-dual metaphysics. Very rough and basically it states that there are no separate souls nor objects, but only Maya - illusion, magic play, seeming - of the Absolute, that is the only real Being, omnipotent and omnipresent. Seeing yourself separate from other people, beings and objects is an illusion, just like having seemingly sentient people in your dreams is an illusion.

>>1816 I've been in one of those. Fell asleep IRL, woke up in a car I really liked in a parking lot of a mall sized world with a phone that was locked. On the phone was a number. When I tried to unlock the phone it said pay X currency to unlock. So I did and it was registered to me and the number went down. I went into the mall to see people wandering around messing with their avatars, gumi sexing, buying soykaf with their phone currency. . . >mind tech doesn't already exist

I think most of these explanations overcomplicate things. It is clear dreams reflect your waking life in some sense. Our whole waking life is through this sensory experience you describe, an individual self and an external reality. It is a default perception, one that's hardwired into us. Those born blind don't see in their dreams. Your body does what's easiest. It's not easy to increase your level of perception to a small world.

>>1803 >I guess what I'm saying is, in a dream I can control other people, but I am not aware in them as I am aware in myself. Why is this the case? I clearly have made them, and I exercise control over them. No, you can't. Your brain can. A distillation of my theory here is that the brain simulates your reaction-loop, but also attempts to simulate and predict other people's reaction-loops as well. Being able to predict other beings is a survival skill -- actually it's the core skill for predators, around which all others are based (Moreso for predators because their food-gathering system relies on being able to accurately predict other being's specific behaviour, whereas herbavores need to predict the general location, but it's not as specific with like "where is this animal in the herd going to move, is it in pain, will it move left or right when I chase it in this way", etc.). [Also, fun note: Both the skills of generalization and empathy are pretty easily derived from simulation of reaction-loops]. Because of this iterative process of constantly, automatically figuring out other people's behaviour and predicting their actions, and given a shared history and enough similarity, we can predict people remarkably well. This simulation process I think can be trivially said to be asymptotic (You never have perfect information available, and if you had perfect information, you'd just be basing it off that, not actually simulating it). But this is external to *your* reaction-loop. What I mean here is that like, what makes you *you* is built upon the same layer that simulates reaction loops, the difference is the amount of data that you have that makes you central to who you are. There are other people there, your loved ones, etc. They are being simulated when you predict their actions, but they can never be more than shells or 'echoes' because of the information difference involved. There are huge orders of magnitude between the amount of information that goes into a person, and the amount of information you can learn about a person. Two examples here. Firstly, it is a common thing among twins for them within the first ten years for it to be considered that they 'share a personality'. That is because their experiences are closely similar not just from the from the way they were nurtured, and experience down to their very first moments of life, but also the genetic influences, etc. They essentially can be thought of under my theory as running two reaction-loops, and because the amount of information is so similar among the loops, the only thing that establishes which person they are (i.e. For want of a better, less culturally loaded term, the 'dominant' loop) is which one has 'information primacy', or, in other terms, twins are interesting under this theory because the only thing that causes them to differ from one another is... the amount of differing experiences. The second example is one single human being with dissociative identity syndrome. Within the theory this is easy to explain. Consider one person as being a single loop. What causes this person to differ from the 'other', predictive loops? Information, partly of memories, and partly of {control over} and {access to} the body and its senses. In DID one loop can be said to have information primacy, but the underlying simulation layer not only sometimes mistakenly simulates *other* loops without isolating them from the 'main' loop, but sometimes stops simulating the 'main' loop (this in fact very clearly explains blackouts, etc.). So, anyway, ultimately you cannot control the other people in your dreams, because it is on a layer below 'you'. > If you could actually imagine fully fleshed out people then you could just imagine an infinite number of people trying to solve whatever problem you are working on and have the answer immediately. Sorry but, what? This is bullsoykaf. If you could actually imagine an (asymptotically) infinite number of people trying to solve whatever problem 'you' are working on, 'you' wouldn't have the answer immediately at all. You would be bound by the average speed that the alternate selves could compute something, and also by the speed that the brain can compute each self doing whatever the 'planck-length' equivalent or unitary measure of thought is. And then by the speed that it takes to realise that the answer is there, stop the simulations and communicate that back.

I think that humans are composite consciousnesses because the sensation of feeling where a part of a body is can be focused on separately. What we call "focusing on the tip of the nose" can also be called "the tip of the nose being more aware". The thumb can be focused on and its like your thumb is telling your brain what it feels like to be a thumb. There's thumbness to that feeling. So humans are composite beings. Not just in the anatomical sense, but in the sense of individual feeling observant parts. Humans are thinking brain just as much as they are a pair of arms feeling the weight of an object just as much as they are an eardrum turning waves of air pressure into an electrical signal of varying intensity that is felt by the mind.