lucid dreams and free will

From another thread:

This has always fascinated me.

So, on this thread I’ll explore it more fully.

In particular, in regard to the experience described as “lucid dreaming”.

From the WebMD website
Minesh Khatri, MD

The first problem I have here is that, to the best of my recollection, I have never had one of these. The closest I come to one is when, while falling to sleep, I’ll be thinking about something from the past or the present and then dream about it. But in the dream itself I’ve never thought to myself, “I know this is just a dream, so I’ll go with it”.

That would be particularly surreal as far as my own understanding of determinism is concerned. In the dream, I am compelled by my brain on two levels. First, in being deluded into thinking that I am able to control my dreaming “lucidly” and secondly the part in which the brain is autonomically producing the dream itself chemically and neurologically. It’s all intertwined in the only possible reality but my perception of the experience becomes all the more mind-boggling.

Whatever that means when the mind is only boggled as it ever could be.

But then ever and always this part: my failure to understand it in the most rational manner.

From reddit:

Again, in the past, I have had conversations with those who claimed to have had lucid dreams. Though not in regard to the subject of free will. I have not myself ever had one. So I really don’t know what the experience itself is like. And if you google “lucid dreams and free will” the pickings are slim. It doesn’t seem to be a correlation that many are inclined to think about.

But, in a determined universe as I understand it, interactions in dreams, lucid or otherwise, are interchangeable with the interactions of the wide awake selves: wholly beyond the control of anything other than that which explains what is behind the laws of matter themselves.

Nothing would seem to escape that. There is no “taking control” over our surroundings. There is only the psychological illusion of having done so. All that dreams, lucid or otherwise, do is to show us how the brain is able to create a reality that we think we do control when, upon waking, we recognize that we don’t at all.

No, to me, the really interesting question is still this: am I typing these words here and now “wide awake” only because I could have freely opted not to?

Or not?

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A lucid dream occurs when the mind isn’t fully awake yet, so a person is in a state of semi-consciousness, so the dream is still being dreamt but through a partly-consciousness mind.

Until one reaches a certain level of awakedness, one cannot yet control the dream, so it plays out like memorex, in one’s mind, like you’re watching a film. As the consciousness slowly ‘unfolds’ so too does the ability to control the dream.

I often experience this state (and other mental phenomena) due to having fatigue… the mind being slow to unfold and awaken. I can also experience colour Synesthesia and phantom smells at this point, but not always.

How do you see free will tying into that?

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The mind fully awake, the mind dreaming, the mind somewhere in between dreaming lucidly.

Free will comes into it given the extent to which we can determine if the human brain as matter is wholly in sync with the laws of matter such that in whatever state the mind was in, is in, will be in, it is the only possible state that it can be in.

In other words, if I am typing these words wide awake, or in a dream or in a lucid dream, it’s all interchangeable in the only possible reality.

And, thus, when some insist that, no, they are fully capable of opting not to read these words, this merely reflects the psychological illusion of free will built into the biological evolution of matter culminating in the human brain on this particular planet.

I gather you mean, at that particular point in time?

The final state of mind leading up to the point of entering the dream state would be dependent on the right combination of factors coming into play, up to that point… so not pre-determined, but more of a psychological slot machine.

Well… there is only one reality playing out, but the interchangeability of the different dream states is still dependent on the on-going combination of the right factors of specific physiological biochemistry, which is not determined but transient.

Being compelled to do something, i.e. read this post, is different from choosing to, which is different from fated to… although the state of a diminished consciousness at any time of day, will also lead to a dream-like state.

The consciousness changes states throughout the day, in most, which is again dependent on many transient biochemical factors… so not determined.

As I understand a determined universe, any particular point in time is only as it ever could have been…if the human brain is but more matter inherently/necessarily in sync with whatever brought into existence the “immutable laws of matter”.

I just don’t “pretend”/pretend to know what this means going that far back.

So, did you “gather” here given the psychological illusion of free will to speculate on my meaning or did you gather given that you were free to opt not to?

Okay, so how does one go about demonstrating how, when, why the brain “shifts” from one point to the other? My contention is that all of the points are interchangeable in the only possible reality. Unless, of course, somehow “human psychology” itself managed through the evolution of non-living matter into living matter here on planet Earth, to acquire the extraordinary capacity to reconfigure the laws of matter into minds able to opt freely to choose among alternative possibilities.

And I’m not arguing this is not the case, only that there does not appear to be a scientific and a philosophical consensus that in fact does pin it down.

Right factors, wrong factors. What does that mean in a world where all factors are just dominoes toppling over onto each other in the only possible reality.

Then we’re just back to that amazing human brain able to make such distinctions in the first place. No other matter on the planet seems able to. Even right and wrong behaviors as construed by all other animals – either as predator or prey – is derived almost entirely from instinct. Their brains “order” them to do what they must to survive.

But our brains? That ghost in the machine somehow able to opt among conflicting orders? Is that just the illusion of free will? Dreaming or not?

Not if your brain is compelled to delude you into thinking that you are free to make these distinctions.

Like you can actually demonstrate to the scientific and to the philosophical communities that this assertion is in fact true.

Help em out Trish

youtu.be/YqdChFIJo3k

Wait hold on she tried to slip out the back in that attempt to rescue freewill. Bro I thought the video would be good because she’s Paul churchland’s girl… But she just totally made no profound point in that example of ‘control’ as ‘freewill’. what she just said meant absolutely, irrevocably, and unequivocally… not a gosh darn thing against the deterministic argument.

Will reply more appropriately, later…

It ain’t me who needs her help.

From reddit:

My own point more or less. The brain asleep, the brain dreaming, the brain dreaming lucidly, the brain wide awake. It’s not like there are buttons we can push to shift it from one mode to another. It’s the same brain doing what it must do given the “antecedent events” that led up to the evolution of matter into brains.

Unless, in fact, the human brain has an “extra ingredient”. A “secret sauce” that [somehow] makes it qualitatively different from all the other matter in the universe. Matter that either does this or does that. Period. No questions asked. And that’s because with all the other matter no questions can be asked.

Though I’ll be the first to admit that viscerally, deep down inside, I still can’t think myself into believing that I don’t have components in my own brain that allow me to freely opt to stop typing these words right now and go make a sandwich…

Sandwich made. Sandwich eaten. Typing new words.

You tell me.

Then this:

The waking brain has created the illusion of free will. We think that we are free even though we could never have thought otherwise. And some then take “greater satisfaction” in this…as though the satisfaction they feel is not in and of itself wholly determined.

And that’s when brains like ours become particularly surreal.

From Reddit
Is controlling a lucid dream an expression of free will?

I still don’t really grasp what it means to experience a lucid dream. Instead, almost all of my dreams are lucid in the sense that, well, it makes sense that I would dream it because it revolves around experiences in particular contexts that are familiar to me. It’s just that when I wake up I will remember things in the dream that could not possibly really happen in the wide awake world.

But to actually be aware that I am dreaming in the dream…to “gain some amount of control over the dream characters, narrative, and environment”?

Nope, never had one of those.

Actually, if someone like me-- “here and now” a determinist – has already thought himself or herself into believing that they have settled it, dreams are as good a place to start as ever. Why? Because wherever you start you were never able to not start there.

It’s just that, with lucid dreams, it seems more problematic given at least some measure of autonomy. If you accept that the waking hours are experienced freely and that dreams are entirely the domain of the brain chemically and neurologically, how exactly would you fit the control you have over your sense of reality in a lucid dream?

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How do you not already understand such things at your age?

First let’s go back to this above:

To which you posted:

And then there is the discussion that you and Wendy keep dodging here: ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 7&start=25

Hey your boy Harris did a new 45 min podcast three weeks ago on freewill.

youtu.be/u45SP7Xv_oU

More to the point, the part where we think, feel, and intuit [given a truly visceral certainty], that we are doing it because we opted to do so of our own free will.

How can any hard determinist not take pause with that?

On the other hand, here I go back to dreams. Last night I had a truly elaborate “work dream”. Back to the company I worked for for over 25 years. Back to a work context I know like the back of my hand. Back to people I interacted with for years. In the dream I was thinking about what I was doing and exchanging conversations with those who were reacting to what I said and did. People popped up in the dream doing things that were out of the blue. But there I was in the dream thinking about what I was seeing and sharing what I thought about it with others.

Only it was all “just a dream”, right?

But how to explain a world in which from my point of view in the dream I was not dreaming at all. I was “experiencing” instead what I perceived to be the real deal world.

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I had the oddest lucid dream/dream, 3 nights back… it was a hodge-podge of various images, zooming up to right in front of my face, then one clear image zoomed in, of somewhere from here… at that point I fell asleep and so cannot recall any more of the dream, if there was any more, that is.

I meant ‘someone’ from here…

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Another lucid dream… it involved my bath towels… I went around the house collecting my bath towels up, in an urgent necessity to wash them. A sign that I have regained the capacity to undertake housework, perhaps. :-k

Again, I fell asleep… and the dream subsided along with it.

Hi Magsjy,

Hope you are well.

How can you know that that was actually a lucid dream, MagsJ? That sounds like it could have simply been you just remembering part of a vivid dream that you had - a dream that came about while you were awake out of a conscious or less than conscious desire to wash your towels. The mind is always gathering material for the dream world. lol

You might or might not be able to figure out if it was a lucid dream or not based on the below.

Take care and please wear your mask.

[b]Definition

Paul Tholey laid the epistemological basis for the research of lucid dreams, proposing seven different conditions of clarity that a dream must fulfill in order to be defined as a lucid dream:[44][45][46]

Awareness of the dream state (orientation)
Awareness of the capacity to make decisions
Awareness of memory functions
Awareness of self
Awareness of the dream environment
Awareness of the meaning of the dream
Awareness of concentration and focus (the subjective clarity of that state) [/b]

[b]Later, in 1992, a study by Deirdre Barrett examined whether lucid dreams contained four “corollaries” of lucidity:

The dreamer is aware that they are dreaming
Objects disappear after waking
Physical laws need not apply in the dream
The dreamer has a clear memory of the waking world
[/b]