Hacker News Reader

Comment by drakonka | Hacker News Reader

In a dream I actually am fully immersed and can see the entire world as if it was real. In a normal dream I assume the dream is the real world, and in a lucid dream it is vivid enough to feel, look, and sound like a real physical experience though I know it's not. But in a dream there is no real visual still being processed to compete with the dream visual, so surely it can't be exactly the same? If it's really like dreaming then TIL I may have aphantasia..

View on HN

In a dream I think I can see a whole world, but I actually can't. Upon closer inspection, only the relevant characteristics of the thing I'm "looking" at are actually "rendered" or "simulated", and the rest is filled in by a vague feeling of "yeah yeah trust me bro there's a world there"

It's basically like AI Minecraft. You know, that project where someone trained a stable diffusion model to predict the next video frame based on the previous frame and the player inputs. Then people started speedrunning it, like by looking down into a lava pool and back up, now they're in the Nether (underground lava dimension). That's how I think dreams are, except you don't even get a full video frame, just one object of focus.

That makes sense and there are some philosophical questions about whether our own world may be rendered similarly to a video game - do the things not within our senses actually render? Or do they only 'load in' when we observe them?

For me the real surprise is the fidelity of the visual I _do_ get. Sounds, sight, and touch feel just like real life (in lucid dreams especially now that I think of it). If the quality of our waking visualization is really meant to be the same as it is in our dreams, for me it is nowhere close.

Our world exists. Don't overthink it. But dreams aren't real at alll, they just fill in a bare minimum of data and handwave the rest. Which is also what I was getting at with my visual imagination, although the rest isn't handwaved away at all - if I think of an apple on a desk I'm under no illusion there's any more than a ("low res") image of an apple and part of a desk.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com