The Brain’s Virtual Reality Tuesday, Mar 24 2009
brain and superintelligence 10:35 pm
The human brain has a fuzzy virtual reality module, which kicks into action during dreams and serious drug trips like LSD and DMT. This VR module can render color 3D scenes, often with physically unrealistic characteristics (unless you’re alexithymic, as we discovered in Ian’s comment in the last post), with objects that can morph and rapidly appear and disappear. It does seem to be difficult to focus on small details in these alternate scenes, however, especially the reading of text, whether real or in a dream.
My guess is that these “VR scenes” are just perturbations of the usual virtual scene which our brain creates that we call “reality”. Based on evolutionary conservation of complexity, this seems like the most likely possibility.
In the future, it might become possible to hijack the way this “personal VR” works with brain-computer interfacing. That’s what I mentioned in the post about brain-computer interfaces for manipulating dreams and what Kurzweil calls “experience beaming” in his books.
From our current vantage point, we call dreams and hallucinogen trips “weird” because they reflect external reality less accurately than sober awareness, and introduce unlawful and odd complexity that doesn’t help the observer manipulate or understand the true external environment as well. (It does give them another unique cognitive reference point which may have its own special benefits, but nothing too useful. Some people claim to have lucid dreams, and people have come to legitimate epiphanies about their lives or the world while on certain drugs.)
From the perspective of a posthuman with a different “experiential palette”, or own daily experience may seem like a silly drug trip, a drunken blur. For instance, distant objects look small and undetailed to us. A posthuman with direct experiential connections to sensors throughout the environment might be able to behold the full features of the distant object via a light-speed connection to remote sensors. Isn’t it more natural to behold as many things as possible in their full size and detail, rather than be restricted to objects immediately around oneself and in one’s line of sight?
If there are such major perceptual shortcomings that we have, then isn’t it possible that they might be accompanied by cognitive or imaginative shortcomings that we lack even the self-reflection to perceive?
Dopaminergic drugs seem to have the capacity to sharply delineate objects in the outside world and create an extremely vivid sense of reality. Especially before building tolerance to them. Clouds, for instance, became so magnificently beautiful, vivid and intense that I could stare at them for hours (under the influence of a specific drug). Trees and other objects in the outside world were much more concrete and defined in shape. Its just really hard to describe how unbelievably beautiful the look of the world took on due to these drug experiences. In other drug experiences I became able to detect even the slightest nuances of emotions in other people’s more angelic looking faces.
I personally want my egocentric virtual perceptual consciousness to be populated by stunningly attractive people and other objects of sublime allure all the time. I suspect posthuman states of perception will be exquisite, but I still think the selfish genes may win out. We’ll always find the intentional objects that serve the inclusive fitness of our genes as being slightly more attractive/less noxious than intentional objects that don’t serve inclusive fitness. Hopefully we can have a consciousness where ugliness or other noxious perceptual elements are relegated to the dustbin of evolutionary history.
I could care less about my genes at this point. I know David Pearce mentioned something about altering our aesthetic perception so as to be able to find 100 year old women extremely sexually attractive (even possibly more so than an 18 year old woman). You’re really screwing your genes over if you do that.
Unless you’re 90 and you dig older chicks.
Your comment shows utter delusion. If you saw only really attractive people then eventually they would appear ‘the norm’, and wouldn’t be so special any more.
Real ecstacy doesn’t come from escapism, it comes from finding joy on the here and now. Meditation and wisdom are the path.
I am sorry you feel the need for escapism. What are you escaping from? And why do you feel the need to escape? These are reflections that would do you good if your ego can move past being offended.
Intelligence is the processing of information. Processing of information necessarily requires throwing most of it away so that you can make decisions. Focus and attention has a huge benefit due to limited mental resources.
Although it’s good to have access to as much information as possible, it’s not good to be distracted by irrelevant information. So it would be good to have access to distant sensors, but not good for them to take up processing resources when they are not relevant to the question at hand.
Of course, the more resources you have, the more you can hold in your mind at one time and the richer your internal experience. You might even waste some resources on heightened experience if there are no urgent things to attend to.
“Some people claim to have lucid dreams.” Actually, lucid dreams can be accomplished by anyone with some motivation and effort. Also, it has been proven that lucid dreams do in fact happen since you seem to think they may not. Anyways, here’s a faq on lucid dreaming that is quite informative and accurate:
http://www.lucidity.com/LucidDreamingFAQ2.html
schiftya2, notice how you don’t bother to link anything that might convince a skeptic… I think that people *want* lucid dreams to happen so they retroactively remember their dreams as being lucid even when they’re only semi-lucid, like all dreams. I can “control” myself a little bit in dreams, and can see how a wishful-thinking person might call them “lucid”. But why can’t “lucid dreamers” create and then solve simple block puzzles in their head which would be easy in reality?
Well, here’s some links that I found that might enlighten you or not.
Apparently this article was published in skeptical inquirer in 1991:
http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/Articles/si91ld.html
And here’s another article:
http://www.lucidity.com/SleepAndCognition.html
schiftya2, the way you obviously are hugely emotionally invested in lucid dreaming (“enlighten you or not”) is the exact kind of stupid New Age thinking I’m worried about. This introduces massive confirmation bias into any subsequent investigations or empirical testing of lucid dreaming. If you were confident that the phenomenon was real, then you’d wholeheartedly welcome skeptics, because there would already be sufficient evidence to dismiss most skeptics, but there isn’t, because the phenomenon seems ambiguous.
You probably are thinking I’m not “open minded” enough — but guess what, there shouldn’t be such a thing as “open mindedness”. There is evidence, and if the evidence is there, the hypothesis becomes more likely, no matter what the hell it is. I can have the most “closed mind” in the world and still be convinced of the reality of lucid dreaming if there is reproducible empirical support.
I’m not emotionally involved that much at all but have researched it in the past and found it an intriguing phenomenon. I didn’t intend to come off that way, so I apologize. If it turns out I’m wrong about it that would be perfectly fine and I would definitely like to know.
To be honest, I was a little taken aback by the skepticism since I just assumed (which is never a good thing I suppose), obviously incorrectly, that it was pretty much proven to be a legitimate phenomenon. I never actually came across anyone in my research saying that they don’t believe lucid dreaming happens. I’d quite like to see an article or someone who has looked at the research I showed you and disputed it with their own research or sound reasoning.
Also, did you have a chance to read one of those articles I linked? I’m not sure you can really easily dispute them doing pre-arranged eye movements while they were sleeping. That was an experiment that was done by both LaBerge and Hearne without either one knowing the other was doing it so that seems to be” reproducible empirical support”. I thought the first paragraph of “Lucid Dreaming: Psychophysiological Studies of Consciousness during REM Sleep” entitled Lucid Dreaming Physiologically Verified, was quite convincing but would really like to here your analysis of it.
Anyways, I do welcome skeptics and for what it’s worth am not into “New Age thinking” at all. Lucid dreaming is just something I came across and found intriguing and that’s about it. I look forward to your response.
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