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Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

> The hands are often a tell-tale sign of the incompetence of an A.I. program.

Curiously prescient: it was the hands of the robots in the original film, Westworld (1973), that were a tell-tale sign that they were not living.

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There's also a technique for lucid dreaming where you make a point to look carefully at your hands throughout the day until it becomes an unconscious habit. The idea is that they won't look quite right in a dream, and you'll therefore realize that you're dreaming. I wonder if there's any particular significance to hands beyond them being conveniently accessible, or if any similar ritual would work as long as the individual believed that it would. In other words, are hands inaccurately constructed in dreams without people noticing unless they're specifically looking for it, or does the lucid dreaming technique cause the distortions because the dreamer is expecting them?

Any similar ritual works. The dreaming brain is super bad at consistency. If you know something really well, like looking at your hands, wristwatch, or something else. You'll see obvious distortions and other weirdness while dreaming.

I think the distortions are always there. We are just not in a state of mind where details matters when dreaming.

Which goes with the very topic of Christopher Nolan's movie Inception (2010, with Leonardo DiCaprio et al)

Playing around with Stable Diffusion yields a lot of images that are kind of dream-like. The pictures can be fascinating, but a lot of the details are weird or inconsistent, or somehow "off". I suspect this isn't a coincidence. Neural nets are modeled after organic brains, and the mechanism that produces our dreams may have similarities with the noise generation functions in AI image models.

I used to do the finger-count check routinely, thinking I was interested in lucid dreaming. One time, I had eleven fingers, realised I was dreaming, freaked right the fuck out, and woke up. I now avoid counting my fingers even during the day.

If you don't count your fingers, how do you know you don't have eleven fingers right now?

Count the fingers. For god’s sake, remember. If you want to live, count the fingers.

Yes, exactly I remeber when I was younger and experimenting with lucid dreaming, when I spotted something weird I checked my hands and told myself "ten fingers, not a dream" every time. And trully when I was dreaming my hand was deformed, so if I paid attention to it I could start lucid dreaming. So maybe we are not that much off with NN

How did you forcefully lucid dream?

You don't really forcefully lucid dream, you learn techniques that help you determine whether you are dreaming or not.

Some examples are not being able to turn a light on or off (because lighting in a dream is often fixed) .. or trying to focus on text (often in dreams you will read words or numbers, but it's your brain telling you what something says .. if you actually try and focus on text it often is just squiggles)

Once you start to apply these techniques in dreams, the real trick is not waking yourself up once you realize you're dreaming.

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