cw10 wrote:
I've had this idea batting around in my noodle for the last few weeks. It's not a new idea.
If you are the observer of your own dreams, and they are real to you while you're sleeping, what makes them any less "real" than reality?
If spacetime is merely a collection of ripples, are not your dreams merely a collection of ripples as well?
Is it only a question of scale?
ok SO i was reading Science magazine and i read an interesting article called "Another Remembered Present" by Kaspar Meyer, and it made me think of this thread. the article summary:
Quote:
Intuition tells us that perceptual experience—the seamless flow of conscious images of vision, sound, touch, and so forth—reflects the external world. Accordingly, information flow along the brain's sensory pathways has been thought to follow a caudo-rostral direction, away from the ports of entry, toward integrative cortices in the anterior parts of the frontal and temporal lobes. However, this view of a unidirectional, “bottom-up” processing cascade is challenged by findings which suggest that there is also information transfer in the opposite, “top-down” direction, from association areas toward early sensory cortices. A particularly intriguing observation is that while the initial bottom-up activation sweep along the sensory pathways can accomplish stimulus processing of considerable complexity and yield certain automated behaviors, conscious awareness of a sensory object appears to depend on top-down signals (1–3), as observed in the visual (4), auditory (5), and somatosensory (6) systems. Why is this the case?
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6067/415.summarybasically, there is neuroscientific evidence that seems to indicate that conscious "experience" is not really just occurring as an external process that we absorb wholesale, but rather it is a bidirectional process where our minds interpret and decode what we see
as it is happening. the article explains this phenomenon in depth to a degree that i can't summarise very well (and it doesn't completely pertain to this thread), but at the conclusion the author notes:
Quote:
Intriguingly, the idea that perceptual images are not a direct reflection of the environment has precedence. Consciousness has been described as "an intrinsic property arising from the expression of existing dispositions of the brain to be active in certain ways. It is a close kin to dreaming, where sensory input by constraining the instrinsic functional state specifies, rather than informs, the brain of those properties of external reality that are important for survival".
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08 Feb 2012, 1:14 am
