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Comment by Jensson | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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"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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

>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.

This is only true if you equate "self" with "body", which is a fairly narrow assertion that breaks down quickly when confronted with the complex reality of human experience (e.g. dissociation [0]).

Even the "conscious you" is not really a discrete entity when it comes to self-perception. There are many useful approaches in psychology that regard that "conscious you" as being a composition of a team of several things with differing motivations [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociation_(psychology)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_Family_Systems_Model

This is only true if you equate "self" with "body", which is a fairly narrow assertion that breaks down quickly when confronted with the complex reality of human experience (e.g. dissociation [0]).

Are you suggesting that dissociation involves something outside the body?

Because otherwise what happens --and it's clear in the [0] link you provide-- is that a part of the brain struggle to connect with the rest. That doesn't mean that there is more than one you, but that you suffer a condition that fragments your brain work.

That happens in serious mental illness, also in altered states, see "K-Hole" induced by ketamine. But it's more of "you" disconnected from the perception.

If you take a moment to review the whole thread, not just the immediate comment above the one you're responding to, you'll see that it was started with a mention to subconscious as described by Freud in his early works. The objection to that has been that it's not a concept that's commonly accepted now in that precise form, because it suggests that there is another personality inside your mind, similarly structured as the main consciousness.

The first comment says that the "subsconscious ask the conscious self", or something like that, that implies a rational actor following a strategy to confront the ego, a different structure.

We still know little of the brain working, but it seems to be a massively parallel computing process, with the perception being the glue that composes our reality and keeping us "sane" and focused.

>Are you suggesting that dissociation involves something outside the body?

No. I'm saying that a singular body does not imply or require a singular "self", which can be demonstrated via dissociation.

>That doesn't mean that there is more than one you, but that you suffer a condition that fragments your brain work.

If each fragment can have a discrete and unique experience of reality, then why can't each one can be thought of as a separate 'you'?

>That happens in serious mental illness, also in altered states

Maybe it's not about "suffering a condition" or mental illness at all, and more commonplace than we may realize. We pathologize far too much. The experiences we believe are the result of "altered states" may actually be quite common.

>We still know little of the brain working, but it seems to be a massively parallel computing process, with the perception being the glue that composes our reality and keeping us "sane" and focused.

Without delving into the debate around brain-as-a-computer, I think I get the general idea of what you're saying and I somewhat agree.

However, my argument is that even this overarching perception itself is not necessarily singular. We seem to mostly collect and normalize these discrete perceptions (or parallel processes) into what seems like a single stream, but delving deeper reveals that this composition is not nearly as seamless & continuous as one may believe.

However, my argument is that even this overarching perception itself is not necessarily singular.

We agree completely on that. I love when I catch some falling object on the fly and it feels instantaneous, asynchronous, as if someone else was doing it, specially when it's done through a series of very fast bounces. Or playing piano with both hands, each doing its part. It's possible to feel both or none.

But anyway, my objection is not to defend a monolithic self, but against more than one self. Actually, original subconscious theory seems less tollerant of a parallel, multithreaded mind: "if something can be done without the complete control of the ego, it must be because there is another consistent, self-contained structure in there with its own will" while accepting that the mind is not necessarily centralized could explain the same observations.

Actually it rather looks like the one making a mistake here is you.

As the other commenter states, are you not aware identity dissociative disorders are a thing?

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/dissociative-....

> You may feel the presence of two or more people talking or living inside your head, and you may feel as though you're possessed by other identities. Each identity may have a unique name, personal history and characteristics, including obvious differences in voice, gender, mannerisms and even such physical qualities as the need for eyeglasses.

That some experience this failure modality in how the brain/mind works does suggest in some cases there's more to consciousness than that reductive explanation you've given.

>As the other commenter states, are you not aware identity dissociative disorders are a thing?

These are irrelevant in the context of the discussion and the argument being made.

That "you may feel the presence of two or more people [or intelligences] talking or living inside your head" does not mean "two or more people" indeed live inside your head.

Same way as if you feel that your neighbor "is satan" or that "everybody is out to get you" doesn't make it true. It's a failure mode of one brain, not a proof of two (or more) brains.

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.

>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...

  '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?

You might enjoy The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, by Julian Jaynes.

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.

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.

This is pretty funny. Maybe actually read my original reply. It's in there.

"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.

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.

"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.

>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.

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?

It is intelligent enough to learn how to operate a car...

You are identifying "subconscious" as in "I did it without minding it" with "subconscious" as a structured personality inside your mind with autonomous will and reasoning.

When you learn to do something physical, like driving or playing the piano, you start with a strong conscious focus in what you're doing, until you have it automated and, once you have it totally mastered, you send it to the background.

That's a very different story from a whole "you", different from the "regular you", thinking rationally inside your mind and making all the things that you don't feel you're doing with your full attention.

And yes, there are unconscious processes that influence behaviour, only they're not organized the same way the conscious part is. At least, that's the conclusion I take from what I've read on the subject. Are modern researchers right and Freud wrong? I tend to think so, because they have a hundred years more evidence.

Well, my DSP chip is "intelligent" enough to decode video then...

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.

Well, the subconsciouss didn't learn it by itself either, we taught ourselves how to drive by conscious learning (like, you know, getting driving lessons and passing our licesnse exams). Then we can use that learned behavior on autopilot, but that's another thing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

But dreaming involves the conscious mind - in that while dreaming, your conscious awareness has been switched into operating in another mode, playing back some internally generated scenario, rather than interacting with the external world.

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.

> 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.

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.

It’s not that the conjecture is hard to believe, it’s that it’s being muddled by sloppy language.

If, as you say, you are aware of something, it is by definition now in your conscious mind. The idea that it originates somewhere else is not a new concept. Buddhists have been claiming “thoughts think themselves” for a long time.

There is no precise language for this though, and if I clarified everything the comment would be too long so nobody would read it. By spreading out people asking for clarification like this we actually get to talk about it in a natural way.

> If, as you say, you are aware of something, it is by definition now in your conscious mind

Yeah, but that is a trivial statement, we all know that "thoughts popping into our head" means that they came from somewhere, I'm not talking about that effect.

To me the difference is like between a function call and a process. The dream is some other part of the brain that wants to know something that you are good at answering, so it asks you that question by posing it in a language you understand, ie the "dream", and then you answer by reacting to the dream, it isn't waking you up it is just making a quick invocation. This is different than what you are talking about, unless I misunderstood you completely.

When you are awake it is more that you are querying the other systems and they put thoughts in your mind as responses. Those responses will be calculated before you are aware of them, creating the "you made the choice before you think you did" effect, but you are still querying them. While when you dream those systems query you and you answer back with your reaction to the dream, meaning you have basically no control at all, and the shape and feel of the dream, when to dream, what to dream etc is decided entirely by that other part.

Or in other words, "dreaming" would be the feeling of being the subsystem others are querying, while "awake" is the feeling of being the main system that is querying others. And just like you ask your subsystems a lot of questions for all sort of reasons, I don't see why our other systems would have just one reason to ask us anything, they probably ask all sort of things for all sort of reasons, as long as querying you for information is useful to them they will do it.

Ok, but your description belies something different than what I’m saying.

What exactly do you mean by “being” when you talk of “being the subsystem”? What I’m relating is that the very act of “being” (I.e., having a subjective experience) is rooted in the conscious mind. So there’s a natural contradiction that you are somehow “being” the subconscious, because the subconscious is “below conscious experience.” Maybe you have a different definition of subconscious which is why I keep pushing on getting away from wishy-washy usage of the terminology.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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...

>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?

>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.

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.

[Citation needed]

Why would I need a citation to state a theory?

Because the internet is in a fad where it's very fashionable to require evidence for any claims, and most opinions.

Citation?

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.

Its clickbait, clickbait works, you see lots of discussion here thanks to it (or due to if you don't like it).

Because they stated a hypothesis. In order to be a theory, it needs to be rooted in data.

It's everyday English though, theory is the common word for what would be called an hypothesis in scientific circles.

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