dreamin on a train

Is the mind the same as the body? What is consciousness? Can machines have it?

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jackles
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Joined: Sat Aug 17, 2013 10:40 pm

dreamin on a train

Post by jackles »

just a thought .i was dreaming whilst on a train journey.when i awoke the thought occured to me.did the movment of the train affect the illision of the dream.what do ya reckon.?would acceleration in any way affect dream orientation.
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hammock
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Re: dreamin on a train

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jackles wrote:just a thought .i was dreaming whilst on a train journey.when i awoke the thought occured to me.did the movment of the train affect the illision of the dream.what do ya reckon.?would acceleration in any way affect dream orientation.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE wrote:The posture of the sleeper compresses some portions of the body. The coverlets influence the sensations in different ways. The stomach carries on the digestive process and acts upon other organs thereby. The intestines are in motion. The position of the head induces unaccustomed action. The feet, shoeless, no longer pressing the ground, are the occasion of other sensations of novelty... Now, the dream is a seeking and presenting of reasons for these excitations of feeling, of the supposed reasons, that is to say.

Thus, for example, whoever has his feet bound with two threads will probably dream that a pair of serpents are coiled about his feet. This is at first a hypothesis, then a belief with an accompanying imaginative picture and the argument: "these snakes must be the causa of those sensations which I, the sleeper, now have." So reasons the mind of the sleeper. The conditions precedent, as thus conjectured, become, owing to the excitation of the fancy, present realities. Everyone knows from experience how a dreamer will transform one piercing sound, for example, that of a bell, into another of quite a different nature, say, the report of cannon.

In his dream he becomes aware first of the effects, which he explains by a subsequent hypothesis and becomes persuaded of the purely conjectural nature of the sound. But how comes it that the mind of the dreamer goes so far astray when the same mind, awake, is habitually cautious, careful, and so conservative in its dealings with hypotheses? Why does the first plausible hypothesis of the cause of a sensation gain credit in the dreaming state? (For in a dream we look upon that dream as reality, that is, we accept our hypotheses as fully established). I have no doubt that as men argue in their dreams to-day, mankind argued, even in their waking moments, for thousands of years: the first causa, that occurred to the mind with reference to anything that stood in need of explanation, was accepted as the true explanation and served as such. (Savages show the same tendency in operation, as the reports of travelers agree).

In the dream this atavistic relic of humanity manifests its existence within us, for it is the foundation upon which the higher rational faculty developed itself and still develops itself in every individual. ... If we close our eyes the brain immediately conjures up a medley of impressions of light and color, apparently a sort of imitation and echo of the impressions forced in upon the brain during its waking moments. And now the mind, in co-operation with the imagination, transforms this formless play of light and color into definite figures, moving groups, landscapes. What really takes place is a sort of reasoning from effect back to cause. As the brain inquires: whence these impressions of light and color? It posits as the inducing causes of such lights and colors, those shapes and figures. They serve the brain as the occasions of those lights and colors because the brain, when the eyes are open and the senses awake, is accustomed to perceiving the cause of every impression of light and color made upon it.

Here again the imagination is continually interposing its images inasmuch as it participates in the production of the impressions made through the senses day by day: and the dream-fancy does exactly the same thing—that is, the presumed cause is determined from the effect and after the effect: all this, too, with extraordinary rapidity, so that in this matter, as in a matter of jugglery or sleight-of-hand, a confusion of the mind is produced and an after effect is made to appear a simultaneous action, an inverted succession of events, even.
<HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN>
Just imagine being trapped in a perpetual dream and unable to ever verify what the original, non-interpreted influences were. Stuck with explaining the effects with other effects, the causal circularity of having to elucidate the affairs of a dream world with its own furniture. Actually not so bad [perhaps a quite familiar cricumstance], but highly frustrating to those dissatisfied with appearances and obsessed with capturing wholly mind-independent truths or provenances. Of literally confirming the latter, somehow, rather than merely arguing for an item's necessity / practicality.

[Edit: Nietzsche quote flipped to top.]
Last edited by hammock on Thu Apr 10, 2014 9:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.
jackles
Posts: 1553
Joined: Sat Aug 17, 2013 10:40 pm

Re: dreamin on a train

Post by jackles »

nietzsche.was smokin drugs or somfin.ha
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