Originally Posted by skeptic
I am pursuing a technical scientific degree at the moment. There's quite a lack of real scientific thinking going on here, so I'm going to rigorously explain how the scientific method actually works and how it can be applied to shared dreaming.
I'll start with a misconception of scientific thinking which appeared early on in the thread:
This statement is true in the sense that shared dreaming cannot be proved or disproved via any conceivable demonstration. However, nothing can really be proved or disproved on an absolute scale. For example, if I told you I'm best friends with an invisible unicorn you'd be inclined not to believe me. But how could you prove that invisible unicorns don't exist? You can't. So how can you form an opinion when you can't prove it one way or the other?
The answer lies in assessing probabilities. You must estimate the probability that a theory is true, and compare it with the probability that a theory isn't true. If one side seems heaviliy stacked, believe the one that seems more likely - even if you can't "prove" it one way or the other.
So we come back to shared dreaming. How could we even begin to assess the probabilities that shared dreaming is possible? I'll start with how likely it seems that shared dreaming is possible.
In order for shared dreaming to work, I would assume that you would need some form of physical communication between both parties. In waking life we use things like pen/paper, talking, or even body communication. In sleep we don't get any of those things. The most obvious choice for physical communication would be electromagnetic waves. The brain actually does emit EM waves, this is a well-studied phenomena. Brainwaves can even be measured by an EEG. Unfortunately these waves are very weak: from wikipedia, "A typical adult human EEG signal is about 10µV to 100 µV in amplitude when measured from the scalp." (source: wikipedia page for Electroencephalography). During sleep the brain emits delta waves which have a frequency of around 1-4 Hz. The wires in your walls have a voltage about a million times as strong at a frequency within the same order of magnitude (60 Hz). If the brain could detect EM fields emitted by brain waves, you would surely notice every electronic device within a hundred foot radius.
So far I have failed to mention the amount of information that would have to be packed into these waves to work. The source of a brainwave comes from electrical currents between neurons. The human brain, on average, has about 100 billion neurons, with each neuron ending in about 7000 synapses. The average adult has roughly 100-500 trillion synapses total (source: wikipedia page for neurons). Any particular state of imagination could be represented as the specific electrical activity between different neurons at any particular time. So even if person A could emit brain waves strong enough for person B to somehow "detect," person B would have to discern between up to 100 billion individual signals, which differ for each individual. Person B's brain would have to read those signals in real time, dream about them in real time, and have person A discern B's signals in real time to keep the dream consistent and up-to-date for both parties involved. This seems incredibly unlikely.
So maybe EM waves aren't the way to go. Maybe it's quantum physics. Or string theory. Or something nobody knows about yet. And just maybe, this can allow for that speedy and information-dense communication between brains that allows for shared dreaming. This line of thinking is very unscientific - it has the format "here's my theory, what ways can I think of to back it up?" The correct format for science is "here's the available evidence, which conclusion is most likely?" Of course there are episodes in science where the conventional wisdom was overturned and the crazy theory won in the end. But in those cases, the crazy theory had crazy evidence to go along with it. There's no crazy evidence for shared dreaming, only anecdotes that could easily be a result of misinterpretation.
I could write another three paragraphs about why some people seem to have very strong anectodal evidence (and in fact, why strong anecdotal evidence would be likely.) But I won't - this post is already getting way too long. If you're interested you should read "Why People Believe Weird Things" by Michael Shermer. He talks a lot on this subject (not shared dreaming, but misinterpretation of evidence).
tl;dr - I can't prove that shared dreaming is impossible, but the chance that it's real is statistically insignificant. You shouldn't believe in it.
1) I trust nothing from Wikipedia
2) Do you realize how much we don't know about the human brain and body?
3) You shouldn't tell people that they shouldn't believe in something, I could say you shouldn't believe in the exsistence in microbial organisms because you don't see them with the naked eye.
Microbial organisms existed forever, but we haven't always had the TECHNOLGY to PROVE that they existed, maybe shared dreaming is the same way, i don't really care about proving it, you just shouldn't tell people what to believe in
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