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Leonhart comments on Open Thread for February 11 - 17 - Less Wrong
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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.
Stimuli can be incorporated into dreams - for example, if someone in a sleep lab sees you are in REM sleep and sprays water on you, you're more likely to report having had a dream it was raining when you wake up. Yes, this has been formally tested. This provides strong evidence that dreams are going on during sleep.
More directly, communication has been established between dreaming and waking states by lucid dreamers in sleep labs. Lucid dreamers can make eye movements during their dreams to send predetermined messages to laboratory technicians monitoring them with EEGs. Again, this has been formally tested.
Whoa, that's cool. Do you have a reference?
Here.
Thanks!
This question reminds me of http://lesswrong.com/lw/8wi/inverse_pzombies_the_other_direction_in_the_hard/
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.