Open Thread for February 11 - 17

Scott Garrabrant

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Brought to mind by the recent post about dreaming on Slate Star Codex:

Has anyone read a convincing refutation of the deflationary hypothesis about dreams - that is, that there aren't any? In the sense of nothing like waking experience ever happening during sleep; just junk memories with backdated time-stamps?

My brain is attributing this position to Dennett in one of his older collections - maybe Brainstorms - but it probably predates him.

Would this be refuted by cases where lucid dreamers were able to communicate (one way) with researchers during their dreams through eye movements?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_dream#Perception_of_time

In 1985, Stephen LaBerge performed a pilot study which showed that time perception while counting during a lucid dream is about the same as during waking life. Lucid dreamers counted out ten seconds while dreaming, signaling the start and the end of the count with a pre-arranged eye signal measured with electrooculogram recording.[31]

2gwern12y

This question reminds me of http://lesswrong.com/lw/8wi/inverse_pzombies_the_other_direction_in_the_hard/

0Alejandro112y

Indeed, there is an essay in Brainstorms articulating this position. IIRC Dennett does not explicitly commit to defending it, rather he develops it to make the point that we do not have a privileged, first-person knowledge about our experiences. There is conceivable third-person scientific evidence that might lead us to accept this theory (even if, going by Yvain's comment, this does not seem to actually be the case), and our first-person intuition does not trump it.