[HN Gopher] The overfitted brain: Dreams evolved to assist gener...
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The overfitted brain: Dreams evolved to assist generalization
Author : walterbell
Score : 109 points
Date : 2023-03-03 13:43 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sciencedirect.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sciencedirect.com)
| konfusinomicon wrote:
| I like to think that dreams are our brains tuning in to the many
| lives of ourselves across the multiverse. there are infinite
| possibilities, and while sleeping in this dimension, we are
| experiencing our life on a different timeline. the theory is
| impossible to prove and is a highly unlikely reality, but it's
| fun as hell to think about it that way
| runlaszlorun wrote:
| I'm no expert on multiverses and I only skimmed the article but
| that theory and the article are supportive, no?
| konfusinomicon wrote:
| same for me and it ya it does in the sense that in waking
| life the brain experiences the what is(or what we think is),
| where in dreams we experience the what could be. the thought
| that we are learning and growing in this life by actually
| experiencing the x amount of lives we live in other
| dimensions while our physical self lays dormant in the one we
| are bound to is pretty interesting. and that our brains
| actually evolved to make use of that data meaningful even
| more so. perhaps we are experiencing but a dream of another
| version of ourselves when we are awake
| rubicon33 wrote:
| I used to dream a lot as a kid. Somewhere along the way that
| basically stopped happening. It's come back somewhat in mid life
| but not with the intensity and sticking power that dreams in
| youth had.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Everyone has dreams. You must just not remember them.
| sys32768 wrote:
| When I started intermittent fasting and stopped eating after ~2
| PM, my dreams became more vivid and felt longer.
| spiffytech wrote:
| I noticed I have a lot more dreams since I replaced my bed with
| one that gives me better sleep.
| avereveard wrote:
| Try studying a subject in real depth for six month, that caused
| me resume dreaming
| Llamamoe wrote:
| This is sort of what I've been dreading myself, that my loss
| of dreams has been the consequence of a monotone, miserable
| life.
| avereveard wrote:
| I have no way nor intention to judge your life. I think
| it's more about knowledge pressure than monotonous life.
| you can be havein an exciting life and never exercise your
| thinking muscles, and a miserable life while learning new
| things every day, and all variation in between.
|
| as a matter of fact, the six month where I had to learn
| thousand pages per week were some of the most miserable I
| had in the last two years because job kept me away from my
| newborn, it did a number on my health, and I'm barely
| returning to normal right now.
| gabythenerd wrote:
| I usually dream when I have slept really well for a few days.
| At least for me when my mind is tired I fall into dreamless
| sleep in a few seconds, instead of several minutes with a soft
| transition to dreaming.
| coldtea wrote:
| Dreaming also depends on sleep quality and REM cycles. Bad
| sleep, caffeine, etc, can all reduce or eliminate dreaming...
| technocratius wrote:
| Alcohol and marijuana particularly inhibit REM sleep and
| dreaming
| hungryforcodes wrote:
| Can't quite believe that...references?
| tgv wrote:
| And, unfortunately, the article doesn't mention any of it.
| The obvious prediction is: people who don't dream, don't
| generalize. But the author slyly slinks away from that by
| saying that "it is likely that adult humans already have
| well-fitted perceptual models", leaving a bunch of
| predictions that don't really address the hypothesis, but
| will be claimed as support when they turn out true anyway.
|
| Basically, it's a very badly reviewed article.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _And, unfortunately, the article doesn 't mention any of
| it. The obvious prediction is: people who don't dream,
| don't generalize._
|
| Which could very well be true, with a small correction:
| people who don't dream don't generalize well - their
| generalization capabilities decline. Or course with people
| who don't sleep well, their whole mental faculties decline
| over time.
|
| Even after a couple of days lost sleep, people have been
| shown to drop several IQ points in standardized tests...
| and even lower quality sleep can lead to psychosis and
| worse (which could very well be fueled by lack of
| generalization).
|
| Plus this "cleaning" process is not the part we remember as
| a story/dream when we wake: dreaming includes the parts we
| don't remember, including the botched parts that never
| fully made it into full deep REM sleep and conscious
| dreaming. So, people who don't dream will still clean up
| some of the overfitting, just do a worse job at it...
| tgv wrote:
| But did you notice how many confounds you've introduced?
| jadbox wrote:
| I have a wild pet theory that drinking caffeine consistently
| prevents people from dreaming. Antidoteally, people that I meet
| that avoid regular caffeine seem to report having dreams on a
| regular basis. Conversely, the people I know that drink a lot
| of caffeine seem to say that they never remember their dreams.
|
| I've also noted today many people who take cannabis regularly
| also do not dream often.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > I've also noted today many people who take cannabis
| regularly also do not dream often.
|
| As someone who smokes weed I heard this as well. But from
| experience I still dream, just that its harder for me to
| remember them if at all.
| civilized wrote:
| This feels like it could be true - I think dreams went to
| near zero for me around the time I started drinking coffee
| and tea consistently. But so much else in life was changing
| at the same time, it's hard to be sure.
| WJW wrote:
| Seems like an easy experiment then? Drop coffee and tea for
| a while and see if they return.
| esailija wrote:
| Yeah I quit a few years ago and before quitting I very rarely
| had dreams. Now I have at least one dream every night. Also
| convinced a few people to quit and they reported the same
| thing.
| malux85 wrote:
| Wow, I never made this connection but you're right - about
| the time I quit coffee my dreams started again
| kmeisthax wrote:
| "Having dreams" in this case would mean _remembering_ dreams.
| You dream whenever you go into REM sleep, but remembering
| those dreams requires active training, since your mind is
| kind of designed to block all that out.
| quenix wrote:
| Let me then be the first in your contradictory sample. I
| drink caffeine more than ever and have consistently been
| experiencing a higher number of vivid dreams in the past year
| or so.
| nerdchum wrote:
| I drink caffeine but I don't drink it after 2:00 p.m. and
| have really good dreams sometimes.
| messe wrote:
| Same here. I also find I have more vivid dreams if I'm
| dehydrated or hungover, do you find the same? (And to add
| another factor, do you drink alcohol?)
| WalterSear wrote:
| Alcohol suppreses REM sleep, resulting in a rebound
| effect. This can happen in the same night, resulting in
| more vivid and memorable dreams closer to morning when,
| for a number of reasons, we are more likely to remember
| them.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Personally speaking, both presence and intensity of dreams
| has almost a direct 1:1 correlation with how much I've
| learned or participated in mentally challenging tasks the day
| prior.
|
| Most of the times I don't remember having dreamt are those
| when I've been more or less living on autopilot, with nothing
| novel in work or leisure time. Recently I've had an explosion
| of vivid dreams that lines up almost perfectly with doing
| things I'd not had prior experience with when programming in
| both work and hobby projects.
|
| I've been on a pretty consistent one cup of coffee and
| occasional second cup over the course of the pandemic. The
| only way caffeine impacts my sleep is if I have it past
| 1-2PM, in which case I find it harder to fall asleep and may
| wake up periodically but will still dream.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| I don't consume any caffeine, and I have extremely vivid
| dreams almost every night.
|
| The other thing I've noticed is people who smoke a lot of
| weed seem to report a lack of dreams.
| noduerme wrote:
| I don't think you can generalize from your experience. I
| drink tons of coffee and have wild dreams every night.
| They're even wilder on the rare occasions I smoke pot.
| Sharlin wrote:
| From the inside it's impossible to distinguish "not having
| dreams" from "not remembering one's dreams". From the outside
| it's almost certainly the latter. REM almost certainly equals
| dreaming, and the lack of REM is a rare condition and pretty
| bad news.
| swalling wrote:
| Apparently young children have more REM sleep (the stage when
| dreams and nightmares happen) than adults. Babies actually
| spend half their time in REM sleep
| (https://www.sleepfoundation.org/baby-sleep/baby-sleep-cycle)
| before they develop adult sleep cycles, which makes me wonder
| what a newborn baby dreams about.
| api wrote:
| Avoiding overfitting has struck me as being possibly behind the
| creativity and psychological benefits that some people experience
| from psychedelics too. Psychedelics seem to be capable of kicking
| the brain out of some kind of local maximum in which it is stuck.
|
| Being "stuck in a rut," having depression or PTSD, or just being
| uncreative could be symptoms of the brain having overfit to some
| past set of stimuli.
| ccvannorman wrote:
| This resonates with me; nice way of putting our psychological
| pitfalls into machine learning terms!
| Jensson wrote:
| > Dreaming remains a mystery to neuroscience. While various
| hypotheses of why brains evolved nightly dreaming have been put
| forward, many of these are contradicted by the sparse,
| hallucinatory, and narrative nature of dreams
|
| Dreams are your subconsciousness asking you, the consciousness,
| about different scenarios or problems it can think of. That is
| the most obvious explanation to me. When you are awake then
| disturbing you could be dangerous, so that has to happen when you
| sleep. And since you the consciousness has to answer those
| questions you will experience them as fragments, ie "dreams".
|
| I don't see why dreams would have to be more complicated than
| that. It is very simple and explains everything.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| "Subconscious" is not a well defined technical term in
| psychology anymore, and hasn't been used since the days of
| Freud when nothing was well-defined anyway. And even Freud
| regretted his use of the term:
|
| "If someone talks of subconsciousness, I cannot tell whether he
| means the term topographically - to indicate something lying in
| the mind beneath consciousness - or qualitatively - to indicate
| another consciousness, a subterranean one, as it were. He is
| probably not clear about any of it. The only trustworthy
| antithesis is between conscious and unconscious."
|
| The "unconscious" is not understood as being a "hidden
| consciousness" with its own agency. It's simply understood as
| the collection of processes in the brain that you are not
| consciously aware of. All sorts of sensory processing and
| integration. Things like balance, the syncing of visual and
| auditory inputs. It's like the brain's standard library.
|
| There's very little support for the idea of some sort of
| dialogue between conscious and unconscious.
| Jensson wrote:
| The name doesn't matter, but it is a fact that there are
| processes that we don't control that are very intelligent in
| our brain. They can find their way home, or drive your car
| etc, without you having to think about driving or where to
| go, you just zone out and before you realize it you are home.
|
| Any assumption that such a process doesn't exist is therefore
| disproven immediately, we know that none of those can be
| true. So, since we know that such a process exists, it asking
| us questions just like we ask it questions seems like a very
| useful property to have to handle all sorts of bookkeeping
| and learning. It is a very obvious mechanic in a brain
| containing two intelligent systems interacting so tightly as
| these two does.
| dazc wrote:
| 'They can find their way home, or drive your car etc,
| without you having to think about driving or where to go,
| you just zone out and before you realize it you are home.'
|
| Every weekend I do a 12 mile walk, mostly rural roadside
| with little traffic.
|
| At one crossing point, a week ago, a couple in a vehicle
| stopped me and asked if I realized that I had just wandered
| across the road without looking and they had almost run me
| other.
|
| I explained that I was totally oblivious, had not heard
| their vehicle approaching and thanked them for them their
| concern.
|
| Today, halfway across the road, I just realized that I was
| doing the exact same thing at more or less the exact same
| point.
|
| I wonder now if my subconscious is trying to kill me?
| narag wrote:
| _The name doesn 't matter, but it is a fact that there are
| processes that we don't control that are very intelligent
| in our brain._
|
| Let me point that "we don't control" and "in your brain" is
| a contradiction somehow. If it's in your brain, it's you.
| I'd simply say "you are your brain" and call it a day. A
| programmer metaphor: you start a thread that acts more or
| less on its own and never really dumps result to the main
| thread or registers its course in the memory, but it
| doesn't mean that it's "another you" in the brain.
|
| Sometimes you wake up at night and then never remember that
| moment, it doesn't settle in the memory, unless something
| happens that keeps you awaken, the you do remember the
| moment. My point is that what surfaces and gets recalled
| it's not you and then there's "another intelligent system"
| with different rules, just a subsystem that most of the
| time is unattended.
| Jensson wrote:
| > If it's in your brain, it's you.
|
| So you can fall asleep whenever you want? You never spend
| minutes lying in bed trying to sleep but being unable to?
| Otherwise no, you aren't in control of your brain, your
| brain is in control of you. It decides when you get to
| compute and experience things, you don't get to, if it
| wants you to work you work, if it wants you to sleep you
| sleep, you aren't in control.
| coldtea wrote:
| Your mistake is considering "you" as just the part that
| consciously decides. There's no brain and you, there's
| just you (or just the brain, it's the same thing). You
| and your brain is one thing, not two.
|
| In other words, I can fall asleep whenever I want. But
| "I" (and my brain) is not just my conscious/speaking
| layer. The whole layer stack needs to want it and put it
| to practice.
|
| It's the same with any other activity, just that for most
| there's less disagreement between parts of the layer
| stack. E.g. we can usually speak anytime "we" want. But
| an autistic person going non-verbal finds that they can't
| speak, even if their (what-you-call "I") thinking/top-
| layer wants it.
| Jensson wrote:
| So people who say "I couldn't fall asleep" are
| misleading? What they should have said is "I didn't want
| to fall asleep", is that what you mean? To me that seems
| to be very different from how most people think and
| reason about this. To most people "I" are the parts they
| control, the rest they talk about as if it was something
| else.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _So people who say "I couldn't fall asleep" are
| misleading? What they should have said is "I didn't want
| to fall asleep", is that what you mean?_
|
| No, I meant that whether they wanted it or not at the
| "top layer" (the conscious "I") is irrelevant, the whole
| brain stack needs to "want it" (or at least, a big enough
| chunk of it, so that it's put to action).
|
| > _To most people "I" are the parts they control, the
| rest they talk about as if it was something else._
|
| Of course, but most people are not trying to be precise
| and reason about their brain workings, the way
| conginitive science or TFA does. They just use whatever
| simplified mental model is handy, accuracy be damned.
|
| People also historically believed that "I" is the "soul"
| too...
| coldtea wrote:
| > _The name doesn 't matter, but it is a fact that there
| are processes that we don't control that are very
| intelligent in our brain. They can find their way home, or
| drive your car etc, without you having to think about
| driving or where to go, you just zone out and before you
| realize it you are home._
|
| What makes you think this points to "intelligent processes"
| (in the sense of processes having intelligence)?
|
| It just points to some processing being done in the
| background, and some processing reaching the top layer
| ("conscious"). But "thinking "is the totality of it, not
| just the top layer.
| Jensson wrote:
| It is intelligent enough to learn how to operate a car
| and navigate complex environments with other actors in
| it. To me that is enough to call it intelligent, how much
| intelligence do you want to see in a process before you
| start calling it intelligent?
| coldtea wrote:
| Well, my DSP chip is "intelligent" enough to decode video
| then...
| Jensson wrote:
| Did the chip learn to decode videos based on trial and
| error, or seeing examples? Otherwise I don't see how what
| you said is relevant here. Our genes don't know how to
| drive cars, but our subconsciousness still can do it with
| practice, driving cars isn't coded into humans, it is
| emergent behaviour.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| The name matters a lot if you want to clearly communicate
| your ideas.
|
| Your use of terminology leaves so many possible
| interpretations that it's hard to know exactly what you're
| trying to communicate. Which makes meaningful discussion
| nigh-on impossible.
| Jensson wrote:
| What name would you use instead? Subconsciousness is the
| only name I know that describes the computations in the
| brain that we aren't consciously aware of.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| This is pretty funny. Maybe actually read my original
| reply. It's in there.
| Jensson wrote:
| "hidden consciousness" and similar implies that these
| computations are conscious, that is an assumption we
| don't have to make here. All that is required is that the
| process has some reason to invoke the consciousness to
| get back some data about some scenario. The fact that the
| process is smart doesn't mean that it has to be
| conscious, that is just something you made up here, it is
| a much weaker statement than what I made.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| It's not something I just made up. It's an extremely
| common misconception about what the
| *UNCONSCIOUS*
|
| is. Moreover, the way you imprecisely use ill-defined
| phrases like "subconsciousness", "asking questions", etc
| _gives a very strong impression_ that you 're talking
| about some outdated, pseudoscientific conception of the
| unconscious mind as a conscious, distinct entity.
|
| You can't be so imprecise and just expect people to
| understand what you mean. Especially if you don't even
| read the replies.
| Jensson wrote:
| "UNCONSCIOUS" would imply that it isn't conscious. I
| wouldn't rule that out either. Would I really have to go
| through and refute every single point, I think that just
| communicating the general idea should make you understand
| why the rest doesn't work.
|
| Edit: And "asking questions" is just a more natural
| language way to say "invoking a function to get a
| result". It wants to compute something that the
| consciousness is good at computing, like where to go or
| what to do in scenarios. Exactly why etc, that is very
| hard to answer for such an intelligent process, we don't
| even know why it decides to turn the wheel at exact
| moments etc, trying to answer why it asks specific
| questions is even harder than that. So, the way these
| psychologists approach it, trying to think of it as a
| simple function with simple rules, will never ever work.
| finnh wrote:
| You might enjoy The Origin of Consciousness in the
| Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, by Julian Jaynes.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Dreams are your subconsciousness asking you, the
| consciousness, about different scenarios or problems it can
| think of. That is the most obvious explanation to me._
|
| One can't explain the workings of the brain as some Q&A between
| "conscious" and "unconscious" except as a high level
| abstraction/metaphor. Else this implies two tiny "thinking"
| entities inside your brain, where one asks another something.
| hungryforcodes wrote:
| The most credible explanation to me -- and one that makes
| logical sense, is that dreaming is about processing the day's
| events -- possibly for learning, or committing to memory
| (same thing basically?).
|
| Since hearing about this theory, I've been able to pin point
| my dreams 90% of the time to themes that were discussed or
| experienced during the day I fell asleep. Including topics I
| had only worried about but never mentioned to anyone.
| malteof wrote:
| [Citation needed]
| Jensson wrote:
| Why would I need a citation to state a theory?
| bumby wrote:
| Because they stated a hypothesis. In order to be a theory,
| it needs to be rooted in data.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| It's everyday English though, theory is the common word
| for what would be called an hypothesis in scientific
| circles.
| [deleted]
| IshKebab wrote:
| The title is stated as fact, not a theory. You have to get
| all the way to the last sentence in the abstract before
| they say it's a hypothesis.
|
| Misleading title at best. I would say disingenuous.
| Jensson wrote:
| Its clickbait, clickbait works, you see lots of
| discussion here thanks to it (or due to if you don't like
| it).
| qup wrote:
| Because the internet is in a fad where it's very
| fashionable to require evidence for any claims, and most
| opinions.
| dazc wrote:
| Citation?
| endisneigh wrote:
| that doesn't explain everything. why would you subconsciousness
| ask anything to begin with? amazing how people state things
| like it's an absolute fact based on absolutely nothing.
| Jensson wrote:
| > why would you subconsciousness ask anything to begin with?
|
| Because it is learning? If you had this supersmart function
| that could evaluate situations, why not ask it things when
| you are training another algorithm that tries to evaluate
| things cheaper?
|
| Edit: Or just to categorise things in general.
| Sharlin wrote:
| I'm much more inclined to believe that dreams are pure System 1
| stuff and essentially what we perceive is just how it feels
| inside when the part of the brain that thinks it's in charge is
| 100% riding shotgun and the part that's the actual driver is
| doing whatever dreams are for. Especially given that dreams are
| mostly the polar opposite of what System 2 is good at.
|
| This hypothesis is at least as good as yours, and requires
| fewer assumptions.
|
| For the record, I'm also very inclined to believe that even in
| the waking life the "conscious mind" has vastly less command
| authority than it likes to think, mostly receiving "executive
| memos" when the actual decision has already been made by the
| faster parts of the brain.
| chresko wrote:
| What you're proposing is a dialog between a conscious and
| subconscious self, while in a dream state, where one or the
| other (or both) forms of being are fully aware of what
| questions to ask, and what the answers to those questions are.
| This doesn't sound simple. It sounds extremely complex. And it
| doesn't explain everything, like, for example, why some people
| don't dream or can't remember their dreams. Or why other
| animals dream, unless all animals have a conscious and
| subconscious self and are attempting to resolve internal
| conflict.
| Jensson wrote:
| > unless all animals have a conscious and subconscious
|
| You don't believe animals have a conscious? I thought all
| humans believes that a dog for example had a consciousness.
|
| > What you're proposing is a dialog between a conscious and
| subconscious self, while in a dream state, where one or the
| other (or both) forms of being are fully aware of what
| questions to ask
|
| You say this is complex, but there is definitely a subroutine
| that determines when you should sleep, when to wake you up
| etc. That routine calling you to do some bookkeeping while
| you are sleeping doesn't add any complexity at all. I don't
| see why that routine would be smart enough to do everything
| else, but not smart enough to ask some questions about things
| when you sleep...
| bumby wrote:
| > _You don 't believe animals have a conscious?_
|
| I think it's a matter of degree. We don't know what level
| of consciousness they have relative to our own experience.
| Can you say with certainty, for example, that a mollusk or
| sea cucumber has conscious experience?
| jklinger410 wrote:
| While we're posting conjecture. I believe dreams are just
| hallucinations due to chemicals that the brain uses to wash and
| reset itself every night. The dream itself is the remnants of
| your conscious mind trying to make sense of the state of
| hallucination it is in.
|
| It is as if there is something damaging about the accumulation
| of memories, both micro (cellular, nervous) and macro (brain
| memory), that is incompatible with the way animals evolved.
|
| I believe we would see similar negative effects of why we need
| sleep if we tried to replicate it without the actual rest, or
| if human brains were able to survive on long passed 100 years.
| Jensson wrote:
| But that can't be it, daydreaming also happens where the
| subconsciousness takes over even when you are awake.
| Daydreams doesn't do that washing.
|
| But we do know that our subconsciousness can learn to drive
| or to walk home etc, since we can do that without thinking
| about it. It has to learn those things somehow, and asking
| our consciousness about how all the things works, how to
| react or think about things when we sleep, that is the
| obvious ways for it to learn and test things from its
| control. I don't believe you can run the consciousness
| functions without us remembering it in some way, and that
| becomes the dreams.
|
| Edit: Maybe the hard part to understand is that people don't
| want to imagine themselves as a small part of a larger
| system. We aren't the main thing in control of ourselves,
| instead there is something that can shut us down, turn us up,
| invoke parts of us at will etc, that is in control. It just
| reuses some of the code that runs our consciousness to run
| other evaluations.
| bumby wrote:
| Isn't that incompatible by the very nature that we are
| aware of our daydreams? I.e., it can't be subconscious if
| we're aware of it. Perhaps you mean daydreaming is when
| subconscious thoughts transition to conscious awareness?
|
| I think this is part of what the other commenter was
| alluding to with imprecise language.
| Jensson wrote:
| > Isn't that incompatible by the very nature that we are
| aware of our daydreams? I.e., it can't be subconscious if
| we're aware of it. Perhaps you mean daydreaming is when
| subconscious thoughts transition to conscious awareness?
|
| I don't see how that is different from you being aware of
| your dreams. Daydreams aren't controlled by you, there is
| another process you aren't aware of that is feeding you
| the daydream. Also usually when you daydream you stop
| being aware of your surroundings, like when walking etc,
| so some process has to take over that as well. I'm
| talking about those processes.
| bumby wrote:
| That's the point. I believe neuroscientists don't
| consider all dreaming to be "subconscious".
|
| By definition, if they were, you wouldn't be aware of
| them and wouldn't remember them. Lots of people dream
| (and it can be verified with brain scans) without
| remembering them.
| Jensson wrote:
| > I believe neuroscientists don't consider all dreaming
| to be "subconscious".
|
| Can you consciously start to dream whenever you want?
| Otherwise I'd say that they are invoked by a subconscious
| process.
|
| Also forgetting something doesn't mean that the memory
| was never there. Even people who remember their dream
| directly after the night usually quickly forgets about
| them afterwards, you don't remember most of your dreams
| from a week ago, so that is easily explained by just
| saying that they cleaned up the memory of their dream
| before they woke up.
| bumby wrote:
| I think you're conflating concepts like free will and
| consciousness. I can be conscious of a sound without
| willing the experience into existence. You'd have to act
| some of the lucid dreaming folks about the limitations of
| consciously directing dreams.
| Jensson wrote:
| > You'd have to act some of the lucid dreaming folks
| about the limitations of consciously directing dreams
|
| I'm very good at that though, as I said it is just a
| process that is asking you questions, and just like you
| can steer a conversation with what you say you can steer
| where that process takes the dream by how you behave in
| it. It will continue asking you about the stuff until it
| is no longer curious about the situation, and when it is
| it will steer the dream (conversation) to some other
| subject, putting you in some completely different
| environment etc.
|
| I'm not sure why that interpretation is so hard to
| believe. And I think that process also does a lot of
| computation that doesn't need to ask the conscious parts
| about anything, in those cases you wouldn't dream, its
| just doing something else.
| af3d wrote:
| Occasionally I too have this ability to "wake up" within
| a dream and thus exert at least some form of influence
| over it, such as an ability to fly around the dreamscape.
| I even came up with a system to reliably verify whether
| or not I was indeed in a dream state. It's very simple
| actually. The first thing I do is look around for
| something with writing on it. Having done that I then
| turn my head and then back. If the wording has changed, I
| am dreaming. If I don't do something like that, I fall
| back into the "subconscious dreaming state" much faster
| than I would have than otherwise.
| etiam wrote:
| At least this paper cites _Hinton et al. (1995). The wake-sleep
| algorithm for unsupervised neural networks_ which conjectures
| just the same roles for dreaming. But as far as I can see there
| is absolutely nothing new provided here about experiments on
| brain or psyche.
|
| You'd think 28 years is a bit long a delay to try to claim a
| pilfered engineering theory as your own before the medical
| community? Friston was at least more timely.
| adampk wrote:
| Could you elaborate a bit more about what you think about
| Friston? All I know of him was from this article:
| https://www.wired.com/story/karl-friston-free-energy-princip...
|
| And I took it at face value, what am I missing?
| etiam wrote:
| It seems to be just the editorial that's erroneously claiming
| that "Erik Hoel proposes a novel hypothesis".
|
| The actual _review_ article appears to be a perfectly
| serviceable review of the topic.
|
| https://www.cell.com/patterns/fulltext/S2666-3899(21)00064-7
| fear_and_coffee wrote:
| [dead]
| warning26 wrote:
| My question is: how could this idea be adapted to our current ML
| models?
|
| For example, an LLM just tries to predict the next token when
| requested. How does one go from "next token please" to something
| that "dreams"?
| jgilias wrote:
| Loks like the current iteration of LLMs are very good when it
| comes to being able to hallucinate!
| parineum wrote:
| I'm not sure this is a new idea as much as it is a new analogy.
| It might be useful to some segment of people but I'm not sure
| it's better than the existing idea of just being conditioned to
| some stimuli/pattern and dreams being a way to explore new ideas.
| pstuart wrote:
| What if dreams don't have a purpose?
|
| Perhaps they're merely scrambled bits of memories and thoughts
| that are being reprogrammed when we sleep and sometimes our
| "self" gets a peek at the sausage being made?
| kupopuffs wrote:
| Then stil there is some greater purpose tht theyre a symptom of
| pstuart wrote:
| I believe the greater purpose is the "garbage collection" of
| the brain's metabolic waste as well as the optimization of
| learning.
| gmarx wrote:
| I have wondered this too. What if dreams are a side-effect of a
| maintenance process, like if you were always kind and rewind
| your VHS but choose to watch them while doing so.
|
| Also occurred to me (thanks to chatGPT) that dreams might be
| produced in the same way chatGPT produces narratives, by
| running through a series of "what is likely to be next
| according to my trained network" decisions
| pstuart wrote:
| Exactly!
|
| Psychedelics can give a taste of this with the experience of
| separation of self, where it feels like you're an observer
| behind the one way mirror watching a focus group deliberate
| on various topics.
| ftxbro wrote:
| I wonder can videos of your dreams be recorded by
| https://sites.google.com/view/stablediffusion-with-brain/
| version_five wrote:
| That article was discussed here yesterday, from what I gather,
| its likely smoke and mirrors and not in any way decoding what
| our mind sees
|
| Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35012981
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