Hacker News Reader

Comment by candrewlee14 | Hacker News Reader

Very interesting to me that our dreams make some of the same mistakes. Some of the usual reality checks to know if you’re dreaming:

- looking at your hands

- looking at clocks

- trying to read

It’s funny that diffusion models often make those exact same mistakes. There’s clearly a similar failure mode where both are drawing from a distribution and losing fine details. Has this been studied?

View on HN

I think this is a phenomenon with a lot of variance. I'm able to read in my dreams and look at clocks. I don't recall whether or not I've ever looked at my hands in my dreams, but I also don't recall seeing sixteen fingers on my hand. What I can't ever seem to do is turn lights on or off, which is apparently a common thing.

I don't know that it's necessarily the case that there's a strong relationship between the way these models work and the way human brains, particularly dreaming, work.

I theorise that dreams are more garbled than we realise, filled with pseudo-language and incoherent vague impressions, and ambiguous images, and that memories of dreams are actually post-hoc reconstructions formed at the point of waking, and are not to be trusted. So maybe in the dream there was a sense of a presence and a nearby blob with appendages that could be a hand, but with uncountable fingers, and it could also be an octopus, and it moves restlessly around: on waking, this resolves into a much more sensible memory of a person waving a hand.

The similarity of things observed in dreams to AI is then because both procedures involve constructing coherence out of noise. "Gradient descent" or something, I wouldn't really know about that. Pareidolia.

> I theorise that dreams are more garbled than we realise [...] and that memories of dreams are actually post-hoc reconstructions formed at the point of waking

I theorize that our experience of life is more garbled than we realize, and that memories of life are actually post-hoc reconstructions formed at the point of recall.

Yeah, that sounds about right. Then we get into the territory of the Mandela effect and false memories and suggestibility, and the idea that memories in general are fabrications, or guesses, to explain the facts (including neurological facts like sensations and emotions?) with a narrative, and - yeah, we can't process the world without imposing theories on it: for instance the raw physical world has no definite boundaries between objects, those are just ideas to organize it with.

>I theorise that dreams are more garbled than we realise, filled with pseudo-language and incoherent vague impressions, and ambiguous images, and that memories of dreams are actually post-hoc reconstructions formed at the point of waking, and are not to be trusted.

This seems more like a post-hoc rationalization than a theory. If you can't trust memories of dreams, how can you even know you dream at all? What do you even base your assumptions on?

I think it’s a fair assumption that you cant trust memories of dreams. Heck, you can’t even trust memories of eyewitnesses very much. We are all doing a -lot- of active inference and post hoc reconstruction all the time. We just don’t notice the gaps because 1. We are good at it and are often right and 2. People rarely call you out on mistakes even if they’re obvious, because it’s impolite or they are not sure either.

True. To be honest this is just based on having spent a lot of time half-asleep (for science), and trying to remember what's going on, and imagining that I'm better at it than you. I may be dead wrong. I get the impression of a process of rationalization at the point of waking up (which I like to do slowly). But then, you got an equally persuasive impression of a vivid detailed dream, probably, so at this point it's just one impression against another, that's qualia for you.

> don't recall seeing sixteen fingers on my hand.

to be fair, I don't recall that from generative images either. it's either 11 or 12 type of situations

Extra hands as well as 4-7 fingers per hand are not that uncommon, so 16 total fingers is not unreasonable, though its a bit much (as is 11-12) for one hand.

no, i meant 11-12 in total suggesting that i've typically seen 6 fingers rather than 7 or 8. AI is clearly trying to mess with Iñigo Montoya

I have never once encountered a piano keyboard in a dream with enough octaves to actually play. My dream self will now reliably recognize this and voice frustration at being stuck in a dream, unable to practice.

> My dream self will now reliably recognize this and voice frustration at being stuck in a dream, unable to practice.

If you recognize you're actually dreaming, though, is this a lucid dream?

I've only had a couple lucid dreams in my life, and I thought they were some of the most awesome things I've ever experienced. Real life holodeck!

> If you recognize you're actually dreaming, though, is this a lucid dream?

I don't know but my absolute favorite when I recognize it's a dream, and I've "trained" myself to do that is to say: "Nice, this is a dream, so I can fly!". It's an awesome, awesome, awesome feeling. Usually doesn't last long but it's a cool thing to do.

As someone who almost always knows that I'm dreaming i would say no/maybe.

While most of the time i recognize that im dreaming very few times i can actually control the outcome and even fewer i have gain admin control to change anything i think those are what people would assume when talking about lucid dreams.

Also, if i start doing weird stuff or making obvious that I'm aware of my status, the NPCs on my dream become apathetic and would plainly ask for me to stop playing and just wake up.

Ok that sounds like nightmare material noe that i wrote it, but is not scary at all they sound more annoyed that anything else.

Tying my shoes in a dream is damn near impossible. I just woke up in frustration.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com