
Originally Posted by
snoop
Keeping an open mind does not mean you have to entertain any idea you could ever come up with. It's still possible that ideas can be proven wrong, but denying the possibility of something without a solid basis is just as foolish as accepting the possibility of any and all ideas. Some ideas can be shot down with just a few seconds of thinking, and personally I think this is one of those ideas. My reasoning behind this belief is my experience with drugs that produce altered states consciousness. Your mind's definition of the perceptions you... perceive, the meanings it draws from the raw input it receives from the "real world" so to speak is so highly personalized that through dreaming alone one could not connect with another, at least not through the idea that you try and create the same location. How does your mind place meaning to house? To dog? To barrel? To anything? Through a vast and complex network of associations, the associations of a certain electrical charge in your brain causing a cascade of other electrical charges that your mind has learned to fire off when recognizing that initial electrical charge. Your memories form your meanings for objects, colours, forms, sizes, shapes, lighting information... everything. How, without some physical, electrical, or electromagnetic connection could you connect in a dream otherwise? It seems unlikely that you would be able to recognize the output of another's brain because how vastly different it views the world. There would either have to be some buffer or you would have to make contact in a way that the other dreamer wouldn't even be able to find perceptible at first, repeated contact and thus a pattern would have to be recognized. From there the two minds would have to try and "explain" each others' outputs in order to form an understanding. Imagine you, who speaks English, trying to communicate with someone from China who speaks Cantonese. Now remove the filter the brain has been able to apply on the real world and be able to decipher sounds to have specific meanings and imagine trying to share raw information. Not to mention the brain most likely forms concepts even more differently if it knows things in another language. The differences are so great that it seems almost impossible that without some buffer or mediator of the raw information, that you could not make contact.
However, perhaps in certain states of consciousness, something not currently known by science occurs and it allows for a way to bypass this issue altogether. But, unless you present an idea that makes any kind of logical explanation for this phenomenon, it's pointless to try and prove it to anybody. Even worse still, I suppose you could try and present the idea with poorly constructed and poorly thought-out ideas, which really hurts the theory's credibility. Basically, unless you have an idea on how something works that is testable, falsifiable, and has solid evidence supporting it, presenting it as anything other than a neat idea does no good, and maybe even does bad.
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