Hello, I'm kind of lost with this example. If qualia exists, wouldn't we have some way of remembering it when seeing an object in your dream? On the other hand presuming that the entities in dreams do not exist as object's seen or not seen by the conscious mind, doesn't that mean that qualia does not exist? Because qualia should have some backbone to exist upon... Sorry if this sounds bad. Thanks for any replies.
Hey Willowz. I had a dream I was flying (it's probably my most recurrent theme in dreams) and I've never experienced the sensations I feel when I fly, nor the mind I use to lift myself off the ground. I've become very proficient in recognising how to fly in my dreams and yet it doesn't bear any relation to any experience in waking consciousness. I've also dreamed I could breath underwater, been a god and made love to a ball of pure energy. I don't think the waking mind need experience qualia before they're experienced in a dream.
hi willowz and welcome. Qualia are very hard to define. "Redness" is often used as an example, but for me that is not very good example. When I think of qualia, I tend to think of pain. I.e. for me pain is something no machine, not matter how much more intelligent than humans it may someday be will experience. I cannot remember any dream in which I experienced pain. I do have dreams in which I experience anxiety - almost always some how related to my college days when I was unprepared (by the public schools of West Virginia) for an exceptionally difficult experimental 5 year program at Cornell (discontinued as too difficult - more than half transferred out). For example, in dream I have over slept, run to the classroom of the exam only to learn it has been moved but I know not to where. Like Emmz, when I was younger I too had dreams that I was flying. Never very high (100 feet above the surface or less). I have a very good 3D sense so I had quiet realist visual experiences as I flew around, saw the top of the house roofs etc. as I flew over and could remember these images in considerable later when awake as if I had really seen them. I think that dreams can have qualia as dreams are constructs from our experiences, but my dreams are often sort of "third person" not entirely "first person" and often sort of a view from above at times. I do see what I should see via my eyes also at other times. My dreams are very detailed and plausible as a general rule. Sometimes I am pleased that I have a clever idea that solves some problem, makes an invention etc. but when I wake I find it was built on "nonexistium" etc. There have been studies of the logic of dreams and they are not completely without logical rules. Time is very flexible and elastic in dreams, but as I recall there will never be more than one of you in the dream. I do not subscribe to the most common POV about dreams (something to do with consolidating memory, etc.) Instead I think we dream because the logic is more relaxed. - I.e. it is easier to think "outside the box" in a dream. It is not rare that when I am stymied by some problem that if I fall asleep thinking about it the next day I have some new approach to it.
I have no idea of what part of the brain is active in dreams but I would suspect (please correct me if I'm wrong) that it's the part of the brain associated with imagination. Whereas in waking conciousness our imaginations are very much limited to what we have experienced in in that awake state, dreams go all out (or can), and the imaginative qualia of dreams is perhaps, if not unlimited, at least far more wide ranging than we could imagine with our waking concious mind. I once dreamt I'd figured out the perfect logistic reasoning to life, the universe and everything. then when I woke up, in contrast to my dream, it was all a pile of crap. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
This is hard to understand. Qulaia in philosophy is described as the subjective quality of conscious experience. So dreams would be a conscious experience? Should dreams be considered a separate reality where qualia has its own way...?
I think dreams are pretty similar to actual experience in terms of brain activity. It's just thoughts. You can imagine qualia, just as you can experience them. The existence of qualia seems so obvious to me that maybe I'm not understanding the argument (or any argument on the subject, for that matter).
It is important for clear thinking to keep the concepts of consciousness and awareness separate. For me at least, consciousness is when you are aware of yourself. So, yes dreams are a form of consciousness, but lack full awareness of the world you have capacity sense. (Parts of the world you never have capacity to sense, such as the large number of radio and TV waves surrounding your body.) Even when awake and alert, you are not conscious of many things you have capacity to sense. For example without directing your attention to it, you are unaware of the pressure on your feet when standing being sensed, but it is not only being sensed, it is being utilized by your brain to keep you from falling over. There have been some studies of what is called dichotic listening (different spoken message streams played via head phones separately into each ear) You can pay attention consciously to either, but your brain is processing both to a very high level (I.e. identifying the meaning of the words and fully understanding their mutual relationship such as which is the subject, the verb, the objects and their modifying adjectives). Hi impact emotional works and phrases, such as your name, swear words, etc. in the unattended sound stream will capture your attention. Also ambiguous words in the attended stream will usually be made unambiguous if they were recently unambiguously used in the unattended stream. One classic example of this is: "The boys were throwing stones at the bank." in the attended stream. "Bank" can be the edge of a river or a place to keep money. If the unattended stream has just recently been telling about some boys who rammed their boat into the river bank, then in the attended story stream there is high probability that you will understand "bank" as referring to the river bank, even if either interpretation makes sense in the attended story. Point is that your brain is aware of, and highly processing, much more than you are consciously aware of. Consciousness is sort of a sequential "bottel neck" stuck on to a highly capabable, parallel-processing, computer (world's best) called the human brain. Summary: Awareness of self is main or central concept of "consciousness" but you are always consciously aware of other things too. When awake your brain is very aware of much more than you are consciously aware of. When sleeping and dreaming you have a consciousness that is less aware of the things sensed by your brain and dreams are not constrained by the same logic you apply when awake. It is uncertain to what level in the dream state you are processing your sensed information but clearly you are prepared to be awakened by some items, such as your baby's crying, lights turned on, etc. so considerable “unaware processing” is still occurring. I am uncertain as to the thread’s question about the existence of “qualia” in dreams. (That is highly dependent on exactly what is defined to be qualia, which are very difficult to define. Qualia are by definition experiences, but how do they differ from non-qualia experiences?) When in dreamless sleep you are not in any form of consciousness and much less unconscious processing of the sensed environment is probably being done. I have a non standard POV, which states that "you" do not even exist in dreamless sleep as you and all your conscious perceptions are constructed in a Real Time Simulation, RTS, not neural computational transformed sensory data (which is the standard POV). For more on the RTS and perception, See my theory at: http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=905778&postcount=66 ------ To RubiksMaster: You are correct, possibly more than you know. For example, during REM sleep, an EEG will show significantly increased activity in the visual cortex even though your eyes are closed.
Why do you say that? They have everything to do with qualia. Billy T, there are also lucid dreams where you are even more conscious than the conscious you speak in when awake. From wikipedia:"Furthermore, modern functional brain imaging has increasingly suggested that the memory of an experience is processed in similar ways and in similar zones of the brain as those originally involved in the original perception." RubiksMaster, then you must belive in the physicalism of matter, "there is no more than you see." The visual cortex is only formulating scenes already seen in your life, it isn't "creating" new scenes. Thanks for the replys.
Yes this seems to be the general mechanism. I only gave one spectific example of it directly related to brain activity in dream sleep. I think this too restrictic. For example if you imagine the image of a unicorn, I am quite sure that the visual cortex is activated. - I.e. it is not just reactivation of rememember images, but activtive construction also that uses the approrpriate brain regions. However, there is quite a difference between imagination's used of the visuzal cortex and the processing of retinal images. For example, if actually looking at a tiger you can count the number of stripes, but not if you are imagining the image of a tiger. Try to do that. You will find you can not.
I don't understand by what kind of qualia you speak of. Have qualia experiences already been distinguished from non-qualia experiences? Still the imaginary area in the brain is not the same area where visual perception is interpreted. For every emotion/imagination a different imagination is formed. You can look at a tiger in a dream and count how may dots it has.
I have never seen a definition that clearly does so. Qualia is often described as the felling of what it is like to..... or to be ..... but that is not a definition which cna distinguish it form other exerience. If all experiences are qualia, why the new term? The firt sentence here does not refer to any "areas of the brain" I know of and the "interpretation of visual percption" is very vague - I really do not know what that is. Perhaps you are speaking about things like black visual object being recognize (a cat vs a car's tire)? Perhaps you are talking about the black area in the visual stimulation field be parsed into an öbjectr" which later may be recognized? Where and how these processes are done is not well known. I have described a model for the parsing problem in terms of known processes nerves can do. (Model make use of like orientation detector in V1 making mutual re-enfocemtn and supression of not like oreinetation detector responceses and some othe aspects raleated to sychronous oscillators.) -Just separating the continuous visual stimulation field into objects is a complex problem as you do not know what objects are in the field until it is done. If what you said were true (counting imagined leopards spots. tiger/strips) in dreams then surely you can do it when awake - No one has yet been able to do so, so I doubt you can. When you "zoom in" on the details of an imagined image they fade away or blur.
A dream is still an experience. It's just an experience caused by brain activity rather than, say, light bouncing off an object and hitting your retina. There are still qualia when you dream, because your brain still exists when you sleep. Your brain is still producing consciousness and still experiences qualia. Au contraire. I believe that we experience a "projection" of the objective universe, which itself may very well be non-physical. I believe that the things we call "physical" are only a small part of everything that is objectively real. We are therefore experiencing only a very small slice of the universe.
