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AlephNeil comments on Dissolving the Question - Less Wrong
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Robin: So when you have the impression you are done, you are not necessarily done because some have this impression without really being done. But then when you are really done, you won't actually know you are done, because you will realize that this impression of being done can be misleading.
You'd think it would work that way, but it doesn't. Are you awake or asleep right now? When you're asleep and dreaming, you don't know you're dreaming, so how do you know you're awake?
If you claim you don't know you're awake, there's a series of bets I'd like to make with you...
As usual, this is better settled by experiment than by "I just know". My favourite method is holding my nose and seeing if I can still breathe through it. Every time I've tried this while dreaming, I've still been able to breathe, and, unsurprisingly, so far I've never been able to while awake. So if I try that, then whichever way it goes, it's pretty strong evidence. There — now it's science and there's no need to assume "I feel that I know I'm awake" implies "I'm awake".
Of course, if you're the sort of person who never thinks to question your wakefulness while dreaming, then the fact that you've thought of the question at all is good evidence that you're awake. But you need a better experiment than that if you also want to be able to get the right answer while you actually are dreaming.
[Apologies if replying to super-old comments is frowned upon. I'm reading the whole blog from the beginning and occasionally finding that I have things to say.]
That's awesome.
I never devised anything as cool as that, but I did discover a pretty reliable heuristic: If I ever find myself with any genuine doubt about whether this is a dream, then it definitely is a dream.
Or in other words not feeling like you "just know" you're awake is very strong evidence that you're not.
It's funny that the working reality tests for dreaming are pretty stupid and decidedly non-philosophical. For instance, the virtual reality the brain sets up for dreams apparently isn't good enough to do text or numbers properly, so when you are dreaming you're unable to read the same text twice and see it saying the same thing, and digital clocks never work right. (There's an interesting parallel here to the fact that written language is a pretty new thing in evolutionary scale and people probably don't have that much evolved cognitive capacity to deal with it.)
There's a whole bunch of these: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Lucid_Dreaming/Induction_Techniques#Reality_checks
This reminds me of a horrible nightmare I had back in High School. It was the purest dream I had ever had: the world consisted of me, a sheet of paper, and a mathematical problem. Every time I got to the bottom of the problem, before starting to solve it, I went back up to make sure I had gotten it right... only to find it had CHANGED. That again, and again, and again, until I woke up, a knot in my stomach and covered in sweat.
To realize that this dream has an explanation based on neural architecture rather than on some fear of exams is giving me a weird, tingly satisfaction...
Isn't fear of exams also due to neural architecture?
How does that work out?
It is indeed. I can't take credit for it, though; don't remember where I learned it, but it was from some preexisting lucid dreaming literature. I think it's an underappreciated technique. They usually recommend things like seeing if light switches work normally, or looking at text and seeing if it changes as you're looking at it, but this is something that you can do immediately, with no external props, and it seems to be quite reliable.
That's similar to what I originally did, but it doesn't always work — false awakenings (when you dream that you're waking up in bed and everything's normal) are especially challenging to it. In those cases I usually feel pretty confident I'm awake. Still, that heuristic probably works well for most dreams that are actually dreamlike.
Do other people have the same problem I do, then? When I'm dreaming, I often find that it's dark and that light switches don't work. I'm always thinking that the light bulbs are burnt out. It's so frustrating, 'cause I just want to turn on the light and it's like I never can in a dream.
That's exactly my method too.