The Psychology Thread, I Guess...

LimpyLoo · December 30, 2016

Well, is human-language mere description of nature?

Or is it a prescription for how to act in the future?

(many linguistic-philosophers would say that when we talk about the former we're always-and-necessarily talking about the latter)

Edited December 30, 2016 by LimpyLoo

Ivy Zemura yvI oo ii oo · December 30, 2016

On 12/30/2016 at 2:17 PM, LimpyLoo said:

Well, is human-language mere description of nature?

Or is it a prescription for how to act in the future?

(many linguistic-philosophers would say that when we talk about the former we're always-and-necessarily talking about the latter)

I think your parenthetical is correct. The predicted future is a set of states coming after the current state. Predicted using a function taking all past experienced states as a parameter.

LimpyLoo · December 30, 2016

Yeah...humans are natural Bayesians

**chim** · December 31, 2016

Can we talk about dreams in this thread? I've always been fascinated by dreams, although my interest has waned in recent years. I've often had vivid ones in the past, filled with craziness, symbols, fears, as well as deep longings. A couple days ago I had a long, vivid and strange one that I had to write down immediately after I woke up. It brought back my interest, and I started thinking about the meaning of dreams. In the past I was more interested in the esoteric understanding of symbols, which might have some importance, but I looked up a theory that was quite fascinating, after a Radiolab episode. Harvard professor Robert Stickgold had been studying the dreams of Tetris players, and the theory was dreams being an enactment or simulation of possibilities and options for the mind to be better equipped at dealing with them in real life. Also, there's an interplay between the subconscious experience of the dream and the conscious reaction to it afterwards. So if you do something in a dream, your reaction upon waking gives you more of an idea about who you are.

This entails a strong contrast to the symbolic understanding of dreams, which generally puts a deeper spin or significance to things, that they're about your deeper direction and so on, and I realized how destructive the latter can be. I've had recurrent dream themes and imagery to an absolutely absurd degree, over ten years. One of them is being lost in traffic, on trains, buses and so on. In the jungian approach this would often signify a sense of loss of direction in life and so on. So myself, having this type of dream over and over and over again, regardless of actual life circumstances or my feelings about them, have always, due to my exposure to jungian dream interpretation, been perplexed and worried about this. Similarly, people who stop drinking or doing other drugs often have dreams where they engage the drug and might feel beaten down about their "inner weakness".

Now, the problem-solving approach gives a softer interpretation of these types of dreams. I've commuted all my life, and it's really important for me to keep track of the right destination and direction. I'm always careful about times, getting off at the right stop and so on. So obviously, dreaming about traffic situations where I'm not in control is something important, on a subconscious level, to better handle that aspect of my life. It was really quite a relief to finally see this interpretation. Of course, I think there's an importance to the symbology of dreams, perhaps very difficult to understand and generalize. And of course, there's a strange beauty to them. There are things that cannot be felt or seen in real life. I've even had tastes and smells that I've never experienced. And some scenes feel quite personal, speaking from the soul in its own language, like good music or art. What are your thoughts on dreams? Any interesting studies to share?

For what it's worth, here's the dream I wrote down.

Reveal hidden contents

I'm riding on a train. I'm supposed to go somewhere, I don't know where, or I don't know if I'm supposed to be going where I am heading. Is this the right train? Where is it going? The stations are passing so fast. Everything is bleak, dark. The train runs through a tight, concrete subway with high walls. It's rainy outside. The stations are so tiny, lit by fluorescent light, a small platform. I have to get off. I float and grab one somehow by the stop. My foot gets caught in the train, and I'm almost carried off. I jump off but don't reach the platform, instead it's a tiny bit of concrete footing. Above, there's a window. The trains are so frightening, passing by at lighting speed. I can feel the wind of their speed, smell the rain on the concrete. I climb through the window and enter what appears like the hallway of a subway station. The walls are white and clear, the floor is dirty, black, dripping wet. A lot of people are walking about, and I haven't the faintest where to go. I head up some stairs and it's another hallway, leading into more stairs, into another hallway. It's a labyrinth, dizzyingly large. There's spiral staircases, elevators. There's dark, grey concrete, small shop owners. I want to take the elevator up. I enter it. I walk off and stumble right onto another train that rushes somewhere else. I'm shaking with confusion and anxiety. An attendant tries to calm me down. I look out and it's a clear blue day, and the train is slowing down. There's a gorgeous nondescript European city outside. The train is passing by the sea on the left side and grand buildings towering over clean streets on the right. A small distance into the sea, there is an old castle on a mountainous island. The train stops. Everything looks open, inviting. There is a glass passageway from the stop, with green floor and blue overhanging tent.

The direction out is divided so as to prevent messy queues, so I find it slightly disorienting to find my way out. When I do, there's grass surrounding a light grey, diamond (as in poker) patterned marble floor. There's small exhibits, shops around the entrance. There are no walls in the area, so I can see clearly around, city to the right, more exhibits in front. There's some kind of felt floor some distance ahead. They're shooting or celebrating a TV show of sorts. A small group of children come and greet me, happy and laughing, hugging me. I feel elated. They grip on a bit too tight. Their hands are everywhere. I'm trapped. They're trying to grab my cell phone keys and wallet. I try to fight them off but feel slowed , like I'm moving in syrup. The kids finally scramble off, and I'm devastated. I am in a strange town with no items.. Then I check my pocket, it has my phone, and it's registered the names of the thieves due to some wireless identity system. I run off to a police officer, and ask them for help. A big group of officers come up from an entrance of the subway station that has a stairway down, and start chasing the thieves. I run along. It goes faster to run now. We're going by some abandoned railroad tracks when the kids are caught. There are grown, foreign men among them, suspected to be in on it. I don't know if I get my items or not. I feel strangely unsatisfied at the apprehension because nothing seems to happen. I walk back, into the entrance to the subway heading down. The walls, steps and floors are lighter here. There's a long way down. I think I'm walking with more resolve now. Suddenly, a man runs towards me, a bunch of people chasing him. I stop him and he drops a huge amount of money , white bills. There's station personnel on the stairs by me that appear to be in on the heist, they pull him back up so he can escape. There's a moment where I have to make a conscious decision between greed or doing the right thing.

I reluctantly ignore the money and scramble off after the thief. There's a lot of hallways and stairs again, difficult to find him. More and more people are chasing around. I finally catch up to him, together with officers, almost at the end of the stairs up to the entrance. He has a brown jacket, black pants and dark hair, with a light brown complexion. He says "to hell with you", and throws something on the floor at me. It's a grenade. I can't move, I'm going to die. It's for real this time, all I can do is wait. What's going to happen, I'll finally find out if anything happens after death, or be gone forever. Everything turns black. It's black for a long time. "This is a weird ass kind of death ", I start thinking. Is this what it's supposed to be like forever now, alone with my thoughts?

There's the ring of an alarm clock. I wake up. I'm home, in an apartment in my old hometown. But the town is so much bigger than I remember it. I pay no attention to the fact that I'm simultaneously waking up in a bed I've never seen, and floating over the city. It's a bright winter's day in the city, with big roads, lots of traffic. I share the flat with strangers. The beds are right next to eachother, in a room with a wooden floor, and a beautiful arched ceiling. The strangers, two girls, see I'm a bit shaken and ask me about my dream. I just say it was very bad, and I'm so relieved it was just a dream. I'm tired of dreaming, it's good to be back in real life. I have an appointment with a counselor. Going out in the city, the buildings are so tall, unusually shaped (straight but like octagons). The weather is cold. It's confusing, I'm not sure where I'm supposed to be headed. What was I doing again? I walk by block after block. It gets darker. I see old sights, a pizzeria, a stretch of yellow suburban apartment houses. I start thinking about the old days. I stop by a brutalist-style brown, concrete building. It's the place for my appointment.

I'm not sure whether to go in. I'm not even sure what I'm supposed to do here, who I'm talking to. The wind blows snow around on the streets, lit by light brown fluorescent light posts. The light gradates into red in the distance, and it's absolutely gorgeous. I pick up my phone and see phone calls from my mother that I've missed.

A man and a woman step out from the brown building. The man is fat, greyhaired with a big bald patch, grey beard, with a red jacket with green square patterns and blue jeans. The woman is thin, brunette with a long brown, tight leather coat, black boots. The man seems kind, the woman stern. The woman says I'm supposed to go somewhere important and we need to go there right now. The man asks me what I'd like to do. I say I'd like to meet an old friend. I'm here in the old hometown for once, I'd like to see the old streets. I mention my mother, and the missed calls. I can't call her back. I don't know what's happening to her. We get on a bus and seat ourselves down. I feel comforted being in the presence of these two people. The city is wide and large, dizzying. I wouldn't have the faintest idea to go if I weren't with them. The streetlights and cars flashing by are beautiful. I lean my head to the window, feeling tired. The man is sitting next to me. He's holding a bunch of iron tools, with a black leather grip that stretches into a pistol like pointy end. He's disassembling iron rings of these things, like unscrewing a dumbbell, then hooks them up to a long iron barbell-like object. He would like to teach me how to do this. All I can think is I don't know why I would want to be doing that. The woman keeps reminding me of our destination, but I can't make out what we're supposed to do there. Could it be home? I'm finally going home? She tells me of a beautiful summer coast we'll visit. I'm distracted by something else. I look out the window and recognize an old street. I used to hang out here. I am filled with tears.

I am overwhelmed with emotion and immediately jump off the bus. And it's not anything I recognize. I thought it was so important but now the two people are riding off with the bus. I'm scared and confused. I get the feeling we'll meet up somewhere, I just have to make it there, it can't be far off. I have to cross the a street that's so wide, filled with cars and trucks driving by. It's terrifying but I make it. I look around and try to recognize a landmark. I meet a gang of guys that say they'll help. They're drunk, happy, laughing, joking around. Walking down the streets, I get a voice message from my mother, she's worried and unhealthy. I hear the voice of my ex on the phone. What the fuck is she doing at my mother's place? I'm so tired of her voice. I answer the phone and say I'm fed up with her, get out of my life. While on the phone, I run into the man with the iron bar and those tools. It's a small suburban district. He keeps unscrewing them and hooking the iron rings on the bar. On the phone, my mom says it's urgent that we talk. I'm relieved to finally talk to her, and ask her what she wants to say. The dream ends.

Ivy Zemura yvI oo ii oo · December 31, 2016

Dreams are indeed EXTREMELY weird.

I have vivid experiences in dreams involving the recall of fake memories. Many dreams involve a deja-vu feeling where I feel like something that's happening has already happened before and it's significant. Many involve a feeling of the inability to remember something important. As in like literally "the secret to life" or "the most important thing, that I should have always remembered but forgot". It's kind of weird. Dreams are fucking weird.

And you're right the symbology always has this important mental effect in dreams, mine at least. You know how back when you were indoctrinated into religion, certain items like a cross had symbolic, metaphorical, spiritual significance? Often random shit does in my dreams, like a feeling of "this is an important event" or "this is an important object, I can't fuck up this next part". Lol

Edited December 31, 2016 by Zeffolia

LimpyLoo · December 31, 2016

Great post!

Damn son...

So for starters:

We might think of dreams as an evolutionary self-diagnostic routine, aimed at presenting the cognitive system with an under-developed behavioral strategy (i.e. the path to your 'ideal self') in need of repair.

But it's not just the cognitive system, but also the extended/embodied mind, which is how/why we understand the behavioral patterns of the people around us without even noticing it.

Also, we might think of a 'personality' as a model of how you think person/society/nature/world/universe will act, broadly and minutely, now and in the future.

Dreams trade in this low-grade behavioral information. They are saying 'your situation is like *this* personality'...and then they throw an old lady with an eyepatch and a cane at you, like some sort of old-timey RPG.

And so the homework assignment that a dream gives you is basically: 'figure out what the hell these personalities want from you and give it to them so they don't transform into chaos monsters and fucking destroy you.'

My girlfriend had a dream last night where she was walking down the street and she passed an unstable-looking woman who said something cross to her, and so my girlfriend splashed hot tea in the woman's face and the woman attacked her.

What is the solution to that dream?

'Don't be a person who antagonizes the world when it's ornery and thus turns it into a thing that might destroy you'

(p.s. I'd be more than happy to delve into the more Jungian approach to the nitty-gritty details of dreams, but by the sounds of your post you already understand that stuff quite well, so for the moment at least I'll spare you that whole rap)

Also, here are some invaluable conceptual tools for analyzing these sorts of concepts, behavioral patterns, decisions, archetypes, personalities, objects, transformations, etc:

-Phenomenology

-Classical Psychoanalysis

-Bayesian Psychiatry and Adaptive Intervention

-Comparative Mythology

-Cybernetic Psychology

-Evolutionary Psychology

(just in case you wanna know what models are rattling around in my particular brain)

And also immensely useful for analyzing/solving dreams is the 'wounded king' myth:

Hero has a personality/behavioral strategy in the world

Strategy is working perfectly

Suddenly the world/personality attacks Hero

The uselessness of Hero's strategy is revealed to him

Hero doesn't know how to appease the world/personality that's attacking him

Therefor Hero continues to be attacked

But then one day Hero learns crucial information about the world/personality

By paying close attention to himself and his world/personality

Which enables him to appease that world/personality

And therefor not be a depressed asshole anymore.

Edited December 31, 2016 by LimpyLoo

Ivy Zemura yvI oo ii oo · December 31, 2016

On 12/31/2016 at 7:10 AM, LimpyLoo said:

=

And also immensely useful for analyzing/solving dreams is the 'wounded king' myth:

Hero has a personality/behavioral strategy in the world

Strategy is working perfectly

Suddenly the world/personality attacks Hero

The uselessness of Hero's strategy is revealed to him

Hero doesn't know how to appease the world/personality that's attacking him

Therefor Hero continues to be attacked

But then one day Hero learns crucial information about the world/personality

By paying close attention to himself and his world/personality

Which enables him to appease that world/personality

And therefor not be a depressed asshole anymore.

Deja Vu as fuck. I swear I've had dreams that very closely followed this exact plot line. Like tons and every time I'm inside one of those dreams I think to my dream-self "Wow I'll have to remember this for the future"

Dreams are like training an ML data structure with samples. Maybe this "temporary personality" only possible through our ability to feel empathy through our mirror neurons or whatever and this is how we can learn enhanced things about ourselves. Maybe consciousness IS empathy, the only way we can separate ourselves from others by acknowledging and understanding their unique presence. Idk spouting shit now.

LimpyLoo · December 31, 2016

On 12/31/2016 at 7:27 AM, Zeffolia said:

On 12/31/2016 at 7:10 AM, LimpyLoo said:

=

And also immensely useful for analyzing/solving dreams is the 'wounded king' myth:

Hero has a personality/behavioral strategy in the world

Strategy is working perfectly

Suddenly the world/personality attacks Hero

The uselessness of Hero's strategy is revealed to him

Hero doesn't know how to appease the world/personality that's attacking him

Therefor Hero continues to be attacked

But then one day Hero learns crucial information about the world/personality

By paying close attention to himself and his world/personality

Which enables him to appease that world/personality

And therefor not be a depressed asshole anymore.

Deja Vu as fuck. I swear I've had dreams that very closely followed this exact plot line. Like tons and every time I'm inside one of those dreams I think to my dream-self "Wow I'll have to remember this for the future"

Dreams are like training an ML data structure with samples. Maybe this "temporary personality" only possible through our ability to feel empathy through our mirror neurons or whatever and this is how we can learn enhanced things about ourselves. Maybe consciousness IS empathy, the only way we can separate ourselves from others by acknowledging and understanding their unique presence. Idk spouting shit now.

Yeah yeah totally.

Some of the 'crucial information about the environment' I mentioned would be visible social information that activates corresponding 'action potential' throughout our motor nervous system in 'mirror neurons'...and that information has tiny 1st-/2nd-level patterns embedded in it, but also more abstract higher-level patterns as well.

That is an interesting thought about empathy. Part of the fabric of our experience is constantly having other people's experiences being simulated by our nervous system.

Edited December 31, 2016 by LimpyLoo

LimpyLoo · December 31, 2016

P.S. According to your psychobiology, that 'wounded king' story is the only story there is.

(The only variation lies in whether he can climb his way out of the underworld or not.)

Ivy Zemura yvI oo ii oo · December 31, 2016

On 12/31/2016 at 7:59 AM, LimpyLoo said:

On 12/31/2016 at 7:27 AM, Zeffolia said:

On 12/31/2016 at 7:10 AM, LimpyLoo said:

=

And also immensely useful for analyzing/solving dreams is the 'wounded king' myth:

Hero has a personality/behavioral strategy in the world

Strategy is working perfectly

Suddenly the world/personality attacks Hero

The uselessness of Hero's strategy is revealed to him

Hero doesn't know how to appease the world/personality that's attacking him

Therefor Hero continues to be attacked

But then one day Hero learns crucial information about the world/personality

By paying close attention to himself and his world/personality

Which enables him to appease that world/personality

And therefor not be a depressed asshole anymore.

Deja Vu as fuck. I swear I've had dreams that very closely followed this exact plot line. Like tons and every time I'm inside one of those dreams I think to my dream-self "Wow I'll have to remember this for the future"

Dreams are like training an ML data structure with samples. Maybe this "temporary personality" only possible through our ability to feel empathy through our mirror neurons or whatever and this is how we can learn enhanced things about ourselves. Maybe consciousness IS empathy, the only way we can separate ourselves from others by acknowledging and understanding their unique presence. Idk spouting shit now.

Yeah yeah totally.
Some of the 'crucial information about the environment' I mentioned would be visible social information that activates corresponding 'action potential' throughout our motor nervous system in 'mirror neurons'...and that information has tiny 1st-/2nd-level patterns embedded in it, but also more abstract higher-level patterns as well.

That is an interesting thought about empathy. Part of the fabric of our experience is constantly having other people's experiences being simulated by our nervous system.

HOLY SHIT. This is literally insane as fuck I've never thought of it that way. That's mind-blowing or maybe I'm just way too high (:

But I think it's actually legitimately really important and I've never seen this mentioned before in any way. Have any other philosophers you've read suggested or even brushed upon this? I don't know as much about them all as I want to and should lol

Another question: Is empathy equal to understanding? Equivalent?

Is it possible to 100% understand and comprehend and grok a person's though process and reasoning for doing something, and not have empathy for them? What does it indicate about you whether you do or don't? Lol

Edited December 31, 2016 by Zeffolia

LimpyLoo · December 31, 2016

It's basically just Phenomenology, (a dab of) Existentialism and Piagetian Constructivism

Mashed together and boiled down into a pithy punchline

Edited December 31, 2016 by LimpyLoo

**chim** · December 31, 2016

Very interesting stuff. So in a sense it could be said that dreams are a way of our attempting to deal with the Lacanian eternal Other in all its forms. And this is so important that we'll spend large amounts of our downtime doing so. Just like the constant simulation of empathy (it sounds so horribly drab when you put it like that through!).

I'm a bit rusty on the dream symbols and all, but there's so much to dive into there. The reason I'm interested is partly because it's another problem to solve, but also that there seems to be a kind of logic, rhythm to the whole thing. I was very early exposed to the idea of dreams having a message, a kind of interaction with this ideal/higher self. It is a strange thing to consider today, let alone believe, but I am somehow convinced that there is a dream logic that corresponds to what would translate to us as that kind of interaction. It's a bit like the collective unconscious, that in us there are all these archetypes. But it's tremendously difficult to engage dreams from this angle alone, for reasons I mentioned in the previous post.

Another recurring dream I had ALL the time, that actually stopped, was that of myself stumbling into an abandoned, emaciated pet of some kind. I would feel horrible guilt over failing to take care of this animal, that I'd somehow missed it. And that'd be it, there'd be no further interaction, just this constant repeat of discovery-shock-guilt at a poor animal. Kind of like what Zeffolia was talking about, having to consider all these important things, and if you're not, then the whole dream turns bad.

Now, the jungian approach would translate this as a nurturing problem, self-nurturing to be precise. And it kind of checks out. At the time, it's not just that I wasn't self nurturing, I was plain unsure of who I was, and didn't know -what- to do to nurture. As I grew more stable and sure of myself, the dreams stopped. The problem is that dream messages like this have such a sense of urgency about them. And being self assured, stable and all that is not done in an assertive, heroic, outward manner. It's more of a maturing, reclining. In retrospect i felt quite fooled by this self-searching, symbolic interpretation and so on, because I was so sure it was a result of discovery, that outward projection, a connection with the Other.

Of course, that particular dream could all be my subconscious dealing with the possibility of lost and found pets and my degree of empathy, who knows.... But why did they stop?

Edited December 31, 2016 by chim

**Leon Sumbitches** · December 31, 2016

Threads like this are why watmm is gold; I knew Limpy was pretty switched-on about this stuff but didn't realise so many other people were into the archetype/comparative mythology/ Jungian stuff; it's something I've been really into lately.

Love the metaphor of dreams being like a training dataset for machine learning

LimpyLoo · December 31, 2016

On 12/31/2016 at 9:28 AM, Zeffolia said:

On 12/31/2016 at 7:59 AM, LimpyLoo said:

On 12/31/2016 at 7:27 AM, Zeffolia said:

On 12/31/2016 at 7:10 AM, LimpyLoo said:

=

And also immensely useful for analyzing/solving dreams is the 'wounded king' myth:

Hero has a personality/behavioral strategy in the world

Strategy is working perfectly

Suddenly the world/personality attacks Hero

The uselessness of Hero's strategy is revealed to him

Hero doesn't know how to appease the world/personality that's attacking him

Therefor Hero continues to be attacked

But then one day Hero learns crucial information about the world/personality

By paying close attention to himself and his world/personality

Which enables him to appease that world/personality

And therefor not be a depressed asshole anymore.

Deja Vu as fuck. I swear I've had dreams that very closely followed this exact plot line. Like tons and every time I'm inside one of those dreams I think to my dream-self "Wow I'll have to remember this for the future"

Dreams are like training an ML data structure with samples. Maybe this "temporary personality" only possible through our ability to feel empathy through our mirror neurons or whatever and this is how we can learn enhanced things about ourselves. Maybe consciousness IS empathy, the only way we can separate ourselves from others by acknowledging and understanding their unique presence. Idk spouting shit now.

Yeah yeah totally.
Some of the 'crucial information about the environment' I mentioned would be visible social information that activates corresponding 'action potential' throughout our motor nervous system in 'mirror neurons'...and that information has tiny 1st-/2nd-level patterns embedded in it, but also more abstract higher-level patterns as well.

That is an interesting thought about empathy. Part of the fabric of our experience is constantly having other people's experiences being simulated by our nervous system.

HOLY SHIT. This is literally insane as fuck I've never thought of it that way. That's mind-blowing or maybe I'm just way too high (:

But I think it's actually legitimately really important and I've never seen this mentioned before in any way. Have any other philosophers you've read suggested or even brushed upon this? I don't know as much about them all as I want to and should lol

Another question: Is empathy equal to understanding? Equivalent?

Is it possible to 100% understand and comprehend and grok a person's though process and reasoning for doing something, and not have empathy for them? What does it indicate about you whether you do or don't? Lol

Narcissistic manipulative people are often amazingly fine-tuned to social information

However, they use that information as leverage to exploit others

(I think) they're convinced they're in a purely antagonistic, zero-sum game against the world

And so of course their interactions with the world are more Machiavelli than Bruce Lee

Peter Thiel is actually a great case study for 'embodies cognition' and empathy:

Watch the awkward way he carries his body around

That is a person whose sensorimotor empathy was never developed through early-development socialization (i.e. becoming tuned/calibrated to the social world)

so yeah no wonder he's (by his own admission) happy to forego social democracy to maximize business opportunities

Edited December 31, 2016 by LimpyLoo

LimpyLoo · December 31, 2016

On 12/31/2016 at 9:28 AM, Zeffolia said:

Have any other philosophers you've read suggested or even brushed upon this? I don't know as much about them all as I want to and should lol

Just to give a more useful, concrete answer to this:

You can go back to folks like Kant, Plato or Descartes and find ideas about how organisms might relate to their environment

And how what we experience relates to the environment, with varying degrees of concern for the biological practicalities involved therein

But the answer I think you're looking for is in the work of Jean Piaget

Who was a scary, scary genius

He is...well, he is the best example in history of exactly what I wanna be

But also keep in mind that your potential understanding of this stuff is mediated by your relationship to language

And there's no getting around this

So folks like Wittgenstein and John Searle had massively useful things to say about how the language you encounter is encoded by one mind and decoded by another mind (e.g. yours)

And that language isn't a window through which Reality automatically reveals itself to you

That you have to squint your eyes a bit when you are dealing language

The reason modern western scientists are so often 'radical empiricists' and 'greedy reductionists' is because they just take it for granted that language is perfect and frictionless

And that when they interact with language they think they are interacting with Nature itself (i.e. 'bucket-shaped water')

LimpyLoo · December 31, 2016

On 12/31/2016 at 1:23 PM, chim said:

Very interesting stuff. So in a sense it could be said that dreams are a way of our attempting to deal with the Lacanian eternal Other in all its forms. And this is so important that we'll spend large amounts of our downtime doing so. Just like the constant simulation of empathy (it sounds so horribly drab when you put it like that through!).

I'm a bit rusty on the dream symbols and all, but there's so much to dive into there. The reason I'm interested is partly because it's another problem to solve, but also that there seems to be a kind of logic, rhythm to the whole thing. I was very early exposed to the idea of dreams having a message, a kind of interaction with this ideal/higher self. It is a strange thing to consider today, let alone believe, but I am somehow convinced that there is a dream logic that corresponds to what would translate to us as that kind of interaction. It's a bit like the collective unconscious, that in us there are all these archetypes. But it's tremendously difficult to engage dreams from this angle alone, for reasons I mentioned in the previous post.

Another recurring dream I had ALL the time, that actually stopped, was that of myself stumbling into an abandoned, emaciated pet of some kind. I would feel horrible guilt over failing to take care of this animal, that I'd somehow missed it. And that'd be it, there'd be no further interaction, just this constant repeat of discovery-shock-guilt at a poor animal. Kind of like what Zeffolia was talking about, having to consider all these important things, and if you're not, then the whole dream turns bad.

Now, the jungian approach would translate this as a nurturing problem, self-nurturing to be precise. And it kind of checks out. At the time, it's not just that I wasn't self nurturing, I was plain unsure of who I was, and didn't know -what- to do to nurture. As I grew more stable and sure of myself, the dreams stopped. The problem is that dream messages like this have such a sense of urgency about them. And being self assured, stable and all that is not done in an assertive, heroic, outward manner. It's more of a maturing, reclining. In retrospect i felt quite fooled by this self-searching, symbolic interpretation and so on, because I was so sure it was a result of discovery, that outward projection, a connection with the Other.

Of course, that particular dream could all be my subconscious dealing with the possibility of lost and found pets and my degree of empathy, who knows.... But why did they stop?

So, a modern psychoanalyst might say that those animals you were in charge of were elements of your personality that you were trying to wrangle into harmony with each other and the greater environment

And that the recurring dream ended because you 'solved' it:

Either through explicit cognitive understanding

Or through 'embodied' understanding of the behavioral patterns the dream was coded in

Ivy Zemura yvI oo ii oo · December 31, 2016

I really hate how in dreams you wake up right before the good part. Right before you win the thing, right before you eat the good food, right before you have sex, right before whatever good thing. As if your body is preventing you from getting too much enjoyment from this mental simulation which might make you want to just live life in dreams alone

If dreams were enjoyable and preferable to reality and rewarding in their own right, we might be enticed to sleep more than we should. So it's probably an evolutionary advantage that they're uncomfortable and claustrophobic and unsatisfying.

Also, you know that feeling where you're just about to nod off but at the last second your body wakes up and you get tense and sit up a bit, widely awake all of a sudden? That feeling is extra weird as fuck while you're high on weed lol

Ivy Zemura yvI oo ii oo · December 31, 2016

Also what do you guys think about whether there's legitimate significance to the psychedelic experience? For a long time I've felt that "There's really something important here, this isn't just for fun this has scientific implications on consciousness and we should be paying more attention to it than we are as a society" but lately I've been taking the opposite view, that it's not really that important. It just feels so important when you're in it.

Edited December 31, 2016 by Zeffolia

LimpyLoo · December 31, 2016

1) Believe the hype about the transformative power of psychedelics. The reason its healing effects (e.g. on stress-induced mental illness) are a bit foggy from a scientific perspective is because our current model(s) of mental illness--and really the whole spectrum of sub-clinical psychopathology exhibited (to varying degrees) by every person on the planet--are outmoded.

And they're more outmoded than they need to be, mostly because Western scientists tend to be 'greedy reductionists' (i.e. like bean-counters trying to solve Xeno's Paradox).

2) When you nod off but wake up at the last second, it's because an unexpected sensation you experience causes your hippocampus to clock a 'prediction error' against its 'prediction model' of the environment, which activates an (ultra-primordial) limbic 'orienting response', which allocates your energy/attention to the (supposed) environmental anomaly, so your hippocampus can repair its perpetual 'prediction model' of the environment, basically so you don't die.

3) I don't at all think it's an evolutionary accident that you don't get everything you want in your dreams.

Edited December 31, 2016 by LimpyLoo

Ivy Zemura yvI oo ii oo · December 31, 2016

On 12/31/2016 at 11:09 PM, LimpyLoo said:

2) When you nod off but wake up at the last second, it's because an unexpected sensation you experience causes your hippocampus to clock a 'prediction error' against its 'prediction model' of the environment, which activates an (ultra-primordial) limbic 'orienting response', which allocates your energy/attention to the (supposed) environmental anomaly, so your hippocampus can repair its perpetual 'prediction model' of the environment, basically so you don't die.

3) I don't at all think it's an evolutionary accident that you don't get everything you want in your dreams.

I am so fucking mind blown. We're all just a bunch of organic computational machines. Computers running advanced AI have to be conscious if we are, period. If it can remember the past, use it to interpret the present, and use it to predict the future, they are conscious. There's no other reasonable way to interpret it unless you go some weird philosophical solipsistic route which is horrifying

LimpyLoo · January 1, 2017

Dude, your hippocampus encodes your experiences into your episodic memory using two seperate (7-10hz) low-frequency-oscillators, and all their phase cancelations are encoded into your "past."

Edited January 1, 2017 by LimpyLoo

Ivy Zemura yvI oo ii oo · January 1, 2017

On 1/1/2017 at 1:01 AM, LimpyLoo said:
Dude, your hippocampus encodes your experiences into your episodic memory using two seperate (7-10hz) low-frequency-oscillators, and all their phase cancelations are encoded into your "past."

Oh my fucking mother fucking shit

Are you fucking with me lol. I can't tell if this is insanely mindblowing or whether I've gone full retard believing horoscope Facebook memes. That's amazing. (weay 2 high)

Edited January 1, 2017 by Zeffolia

LimpyLoo · January 1, 2017

I am not fucking with you.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=fd2Mm_xapbY

This 'hippocampus' lecture pretty much immediately descends into an argument about sampling theory, measurement error, and (basically) subtractive synthesis

Edited January 1, 2017 by LimpyLoo

LimpyLoo · January 1, 2017

***Not 'subtractive synthesis', sorry

I guess it'd be 'phase distortion synthesis' or (2-operator) 'FM synthesis'

Edited January 1, 2017 by LimpyLoo

LimpyLoo · January 1, 2017

Shit, double sorry...I posted the wrong lecture lol

This is the sampling-theory one: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PcYMA27A14A

Edited January 1, 2017 by LimpyLoo

Stay up to date

The Psychology Thread, I Guess...

Recommended Posts

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Top Posters In This Topic

Popular Days

Top Posters In This Topic

Popular Days

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Recently Browsing 1 Member