Thread: Dreams being other worlds, OBEs, Dream Sharing, etc

could it be, that the soul and consciousness (pure awareness without thought)are one and the same? i think so.
take a look at this surgeon talking about a patient he performed surgery on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JL1oDuvQR08

Originally Posted by IronicAtheist

I'm also sick and tired of seeing people toss around the word "skeptic" like it's a dirty word. You want to know what I find brilliant? The fact that you DISASSOCIATE yourselves from that term. It shows that you don't actually think logically about this shit, you literally toss it out the window. Skepticism is NOT a dirty thing, it's the purest of the pure in a dirty irrational world. And EVERYONE should employ skepticism out the ass.

Agreed... but true skepticism is all too rare. A genuine skeptic is capable of doubting even what seems most irrefutably certain.

A genuine skeptic accepts that we're just little animals trying to make sense of things, but the sense we make of our experiences is probably a very poor match for the vast intricacy of the universe.

A genuine skeptic acknowledges the drawbacks and limitations of science as well as the flaws and irrationality of faith. To do any less is simply to trade one form of zealotry for another, while projecting the same self-righteousness enjoyed by zealots of all kinds, because it makes them feel superior to people with different ideas.

Genuine skepticism produces profound humility, not pride and contempt.

A contempteous asshole who happens to be right is still right (and a contempteous asshole too).
Yes, a true rationalist (I prefer that term over skeptic) should have humility but there is a difference between true humility and social modesty which I hear many religious and new age people appeal for:
The Proper Use of Humility - Less Wrong

Well-named, Ironic Atheist

It is ironic to expect believers to respond to evidence or reason. What you come to realize after spending enough time here, or just discussing these topics in general, is that skeptics tend not to be swayed by belief and believers tend not to be swayed by evidence. And even more ironically, most people actually are both in some ways, compartmentalizing their beliefs away from their reason. It's the way the mind is set up to operate, we see no problem with calling ourselves skeptics while in some other context we hold beliefs completely at odds with skepticism.

To really get a handle on why so many irrational beliefs are so prevalent today, take a gander at Stephen Hicks' excellent book Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault. The Kindle edition is really cheap (can read it on your computer if you select "read in Kindle Cloud Reader - no need to actually have a Kindle), and there's even a PDF floating around if you're willing to search for it. This is one of those books I'm extremely glad I discovered, it makes so many things click into place.

Blurb:

Why do {…} relativistic arguments have such power in the contemporary intellectual world? Why do they have that power in the humanities but not in the sciences? Why has a significant portion of the political Left - the same Left that traditionally promoted reason, science, equality for all, and optimism - now switched to themes of anti-reason, anti-science, double standards, and cynicism? Explaining Postmodernism is intellectual history with a polemical twist, providing fresh insights into the debates underlying the furor over political correctness, multiculturalism, and the future of liberal democracy.

Should be required reading in every school. What I found really 'enlightening' is the fact that every major thinker throughout history who championed irrationality in some form (Nietzsche, Kant, etc, the foundation of today's postmodernism) did it because at root they were religious and couldn't stand the way science and reason chipped away at their beliefs. So there you have it. This is where all these bizarre ideas come from such as "But we can't really be sure our senses show us reality, therefore we must assume reality is NOT as we perceive it" (huh?) and other head-scrtachin' classics.

Addendum:
Here's a paper about the book that serves as a pretty good intro to it: Stephen R. C. Hicks’s Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault: A Discussion -
Steven M. Sanders Bridgewater State College

As both a student of the physical sciences and the more esoteric ones, I would critique your critique. As a self-proclaimed skeptic, I would expect you to read what I say and weigh my words fairly.

In its original sense, skepticism is indeed an indispensible tool for the practice of the scientific method. However, this is its ideal form, and when misunderstood, it is no longer a useful tool and an admirable quality. Instead, it becomes an excuse for why yet another dogma should be beyond criticism.

Specifically, the dogma of this commandeered skepticism is an improper understanding of science. Almost all such "skepticism" that I have seen has boiled down to the following lie, one way or another:

"Argument with the majority view of the scientific community is inherently irrational."

The above, if I could give it a noun in the dictionary, would be called "antiscience." At its most basic level, science is the art of dispelling misconception. An observation is made, a hypothesis is produced, it is tested... and the real value of science comes into play when the hypothesis is incorrect, and the experiment forces us to undertake new research and expand the horizons of our understanding.

This has never been attained by refraining from questioning the majority view. Let's see if you remember any of these minority views, held by those ridiculed by the majority: Atomism, heliocentrism, spherical Earth, the idea that the brain was the main cognitive organ, cell theory, the germ theory of disease, evolution, the big-bang theory, particle-wave duality, the uncertainty principle, etc. All of these have been controversial, people have been imprisoned or worse for debating some of them, and they are all now widely accepted by physical science.

The point of me saying this, which may be obvious to you, is to remind you that we really know very little, and we make mistakes sometimes, and on occasion we believe in these mistakes for a very long time. We discovered DNA almost a century before we stopped blaming genetic transmission on other, more complex molecules. We used to consider light a particle, then in the past 100 years we have considered it a wave, then a particle again, and now both a wave and a particle, or neither but something else that conforms to the laws of both under varying conditions.

In short, paradigm shifts are the lifeblood of science, and the problem that the educated critics of the scientific community have with it isn't that you're not buying our research conclusions. It is that refusal to acknowledge evidence is also a very real thing, and arguments exist that this refusal is alive and well.

It is really all too easy to fall into the trap of hubris when disagreeing with a minority opinion. It is all too easy to summon up accusations that minority scientists thought processes must be wrong, that their experiments must be flawed, that they were careless with their data, did not use the most appropriate equipment, etc., and throw the burden of proof back in the face of researchers who, because of the nature of their research, are more likely to be understaffed and underfunded due to disbelief and stigma. In fact, since science is fueled by grants, many young scientists (myself included) who would otherwise be willing to objectively pursue unpopular but otherwise plausible research don't, because, well, you have to eat to live, and then you have to get results to be taken seriously, and the fact of the matter is that it is harder to get results in fields whose theoretical developments have been stunted by bias.

I digress. Back to the point, everyone loves to point and laugh at the researcher showing statistically significant data in favor of telepathy because their lab wasn't insulated from various electromagnetic forces. Few people notice how stupid it is that the "skeptics" assume that psi effects have no electromagnetic component, seeing as they can't offer any other explanation for the data besides "fraud!" unless they concede that their physicalist dogma is missing some pieces.

Then they feel as if anything they can present explaining the results must be rationally superior to the minority claim, even if it is utter nonsense and assuming thoughts into the heads of the minority. I'd like to take my favorite of your arguments, IronicSkeptic, to demonstrate this, and I hope you do not take offense, since you are a skeptic and are committed to rationality and the revision of your own misconceptions if I can convince you of them.

IronicSkeptic: Sleep paralysis occurs because human ancestors slept in trees, and it was evolutionarily favorable to not fall out of a tree re-enacting a dream (in reference to dreams not occurring in other worlds).

Anok: Sleep paralysis occurs in mammals that live in holes in the ground, among others, because lots of mammals undergo REM and the resulting atonia. Furthermore, they are less atonic during the rest of sleep, thus are able to move more easily - and in fact they roll over naturally to avoid other problems, and do so during deep non-REM sleep. Therefore I reject your argument (which has nothing whatsoever to do with dreams or other worlds).

This post is too long already. In conclusion, science is based on learning new things, not on stemming some threatening tide of irrationality because science "knows" something and should be left alone to know more. Science knows very little about anything that these minority views claim - that is why they have, in very recent times, fallen under the umbrella of parapsychology. They are comparatively uninvestigated, but stigmatizing these lines of research is unscientific, and scientifically reprehensible.

In my next post here I'll go over some popular and plausible ideas from models under which some of the things you are dismissing out of hand can work perfectly fine.

Originally Posted by IronicAtheist

So this is going to be, a critique thread if you will. My addressing these different ideas. I don't see this as particularly off topic, it is very on topic to this sub forum. I also am not trying to troll, just critique. I'll do it in parts. First, dreams being a real world.

Let's take dreams being another world. My problem with this is what we know scientifically, the fact of Evolution sheds a lot of light on how dreaming even formed. What I don't get is how you can fit entering other worlds into this... because see from what we know, life was completely out of the blue. However you look at it... it was without purpose. It just happened, however it happened. And the universe was inherently hostile to life, actively threatening it and life had to adapt around the hostility.

Things like, sleep paralysis... probably formed because we Humans used to sleep in trees. If you moved, you could fall and die. And so see, survival of the fittest. So the question is... at what point does biology evolve to transport our consciousness to another world? What evolutionary motivation does this serve? How does this help an animal survive? For that matter how? And why do we not see anyone entering our reality this way? Maybe they do and we call them crazy people. But in which there's another thing to think about... the fact that you can modify every aspect of the dream.

It's nice to think we are in another world, but even if I were to give you that and say "Ok, it's another world"... I will NOT give you that you're some GOD in this other world. You don't just pop in and control a whole other universe at will. You're probably just hallucinating it all, as far as this other world is concerned and so to the /real/ inhabitants of this world you probably are the crazy guy in a straight jacket. And hell, if you want to believe otherwise then I question your morality as a person. Because you literally believe these are real worlds that you have real control over... and you're busy running around RAPING people and destroying their universe. Like WTF man.

I only care about this post soooo

Why not? We don't know how the universe works or whether there exists other universes out there, this is adhoc I believe but needing a reason for everything is not going to work. We don't need a reason for the universe to start, so I don't see why we need one for random brain evolution gearing towards random world-encountering.

SP seems to be a moot point... but still applies the no-need-for-a-reason.

I need to ask, why are you assuming that new world you enter must be one with the same rules as this one? Why must that other world have the same morality? Why must that world mimic ours if its just random brain evolution sending you onto who-knows-where? It could be a computer simulation, the brain of someone else and their crazy fantasies (schyzo someone, perhaps?), some random world where such things are allowed because it had an even weirder start than our own and so on.

Would give better answers but... this is a topic we know nothing about to begin with (With it being mostly on the impossible side), so IMO getting speculative or overly humanistic is pointless in ifs scenarios about this.

Shouldn't the main question be what could dreamers find that is consistent in that other world for every other or nearly every other dreamer instead?

^Very well spake sir! (Oops! This is meant for Anok)

Scientists are constantly adjusting their views to fit new incoming evidence, never assuming anything is set in stone. And usually it's better to try to find a viewpoint that doesn't lie all the way on one side or the other of an issue but has some balance and takes into account all of the variables. In other words, not extremism but a dynamic and reactive (not reactionary) assessment.

In that spirit, let me add to my previous post that the book I linked presents 2 extreme views, and that it's all too easy to fall into the trap of choosing one side or the other and then championing it. But really I do see that there's some truth in some of the postmodern ideas - though I certainly think it's ridiculous to exclaim that it's impossible for us to know anything about reality so we must assume all human knowledge is false or any such nonsense. I do however realize that there are limits to our senses and our ability to understand.

I'm currently working on deciding just what my stance is between these 2 views (but I do admit I lean strongly toward rational liberalism). I would urge anyone reading it, or any book that presents two seemingly diametrically opposed systems of thought, to avoid the easy and all too human tendency to polarize, and to try to understand both sides and weigh the individual points against each other.

It is unfortunate that the denunciation of absolutism is too often perceived as a defense of relativism--another false dichotomy. Of course we should all be doing our very best to make rational judgments based on available evidence, and of course some judgments are better than others at evaluating and explaining the facts at hand.

The trouble is that, whether as individuals or as a society, we seem to be pretty bad at evaluating our own judgments. As individuals we are prone to strong confirmation bias, no matter how ridiculous our beliefs might seem to other people. As a society, our dominant beliefs are constantly shifting.

Today's dogma is tomorrow's hogwash. A hundred years ago, racist beliefs were supported by a very detailed scientific framework that has now been thoroughly discredited. A hundred years ago, manufacturers were adding radium--radium!--to products like lipstick, chocolate, and chicken feed, until it became impossible to ignore that people were dying from it. A hundred years ago, Freud wrote The Interpretation of Dreams, a book that doesn't have much to offer modern dreamers except as a historical curiosity.

So yes, we should be putting forth our best efforts to make rational judgments based on available evidence, but more than a little humility is still warranted, because in a hundred years people will look back and laugh at how silly and misguided we were in 2014. (Also, they'll say we dressed funny and had poor taste in music.)

Wow, loads of excellent posts here from both sides. Since I fancy myself a rationalist and hence an insufferable nitpicker, I will nitpick:

"Argument with the majority view of the scientific community is inherently irrational."

Anok has already debunked this in his way but I would like to approach it from another angle. First of all, the above seems to me to be an appeal to Aumann's Agreement Theorem (Aumann's agreement theorem - Lesswrongwiki) which states roughly that if two rational agents share the exact same priors, they should put come up with the same extrapolations from those shared priors. However, applying this to science makes two rather silly claims: first that scientists are rational agents (why, let's just get rid of peer reviewing in that case, it was never a vital part of the scientific method anyway if we are already immune to biases!) and even more stupid, it assumes that we all share the same priors. So basically, there is no such thing as new evidence under that belief. So yes, it is indeed "anti-science" as Anok says. Does that mean that we should take seriously every claim against the mainstream? Of course not! There is such a thing as claim that is so patently ridiculous that it merits no further investigation and it should be on the part of the proposer to bring forth the evidence. However, to dismiss the proposer on the grounds that they are irrational is to dismiss yourself.

Now to nitpick Anok!
"Let's see if you remember any of these minority views, held by those ridiculed by the majority: Atomism, heliocentrism, spherical Earth, the idea that the brain was the main cognitive organ, cell theory, the germ theory of disease, evolution, the big-bang theory, particle-wave duality, the uncertainty principle, etc. All of these have been controversial, people have been imprisoned or worse for debating some of them, and they are all now widely accepted by physical science."

While I totally get the spirit of what you are saying, I have some quibbles with the details. First of all atomism was never a seriously controversial idea. Yes, there was a major debate in ancient Greek times between Democritus and Aristotle who held polarizing views on the subject but when Dalton proposed the first scientific formulation of the concept, it was accepted with very little hooha. Yes, there were criticisms of the details, much of which turned out to be absolutely true! That's why it had to be significantly modified until the current model we have today which is almost unrecognizable from Dalton's.

Second of all, I have noticed that both the left and the scientific crowd love to point to the suppression of heliocentrism as proof of the evil influence of the church but they have seemed to forgotten important details such as the glaring scientific errors in the theory that were pointed out by contemporaries in astronomy at the time. Tycho Brahe, who was a superstar astronomer of his time pointed out that the Copernican system "... expertly and completely circumvents all that is superfluous or discordant in the system of Ptolemy. On no point does it offend the principle of mathematics. Yet it ascribes to the Earth, that hulking, lazy body, unfit for motion, a motion as quick as that of the aethereal torches, and a triple motion at that." (quote lifted straight from wikipedia but it was cited) Also, it's important to note that the actual observational differences between the geocentric model and Copernican model were minor until there was better equipment invented. It was not until a fellow named Newton came along that Tycho's valid concerns were addressed.

The point is that just because the theory turns out to be true with further evidence does not mean it is rational to accept them without the initial investigation put forward to establish their truth value. It is especially irrational to accept a theory that has huge implications without question such as many of the paradigm shifts you mentioned. If a theory is worth it's weight, it will only shine with a finer luster under the blow torch of scrutiny. It will only grow our appreciation of it's beauty, it's simplicity.

As for the existence of Psi, I cannot in good faith accept it until I see more diverse journals verifying it. So far, most investigations on the Noetic Sciences have been done under journals that were set up expressively to explore it which would have been fine (after all, there are journals of biochemistry and sociology) if not for the fact that they have yet to establish the truth value of the field itself to the scientific community!

Also, wave-particle duality is bollocks and is more a consequence of the (admittedly in hindsight) batshit insane Copenhagen interpretation that the early quantum pioneers conjured up then a unambigeous observation.

I'll come back to some other points made in this thread - just for now:

Originally Posted by Anok

IronicAtheist: Sleep paralysis occurs because human ancestors slept in trees, and it was evolutionarily favorable to not fall out of a tree re-enacting a dream (in reference to dreams not occurring in other worlds).

Anok: Sleep paralysis occurs in mammals that live in holes in the ground, among others, because lots of mammals undergo REM and the resulting atonia.
Furthermore, they are less atonic during the rest of sleep, thus are able to move more easily - and in fact they roll over naturally to avoid other problems, and do so during deep non-REM sleep. Therefore I reject your argument (which has nothing whatsoever to do with dreams or other worlds).

While I agree, that IronicAtheist's speculation on the purpose of SP has no argumentative value against an existence of other worlds to be visited in dreams, because it doesn't pertain to it, it does make perfect sense in principle and on it's own.

Do you object to the view, that sporting SP while dreaming sleep has been of evolutionary benefit and hence probably been selected for? If so - I say this:

You need not fall out of a tree to be negatively affected by acting out your dreams. If you want to have it completely basic and for any creature anywhere - movement costs energy.
Dreams activate exactly the same brain-regions, which would be activated if the episode would take place in real life. It has been shown in studies with lucid dreamers, that when they perform certain priorly agreed upon movements in their LDs, the same sensory-motor regions light up on MRI, that would light up, if the person would do the movement in the waking state. It's in this thread, if you want the source:
http://www.dreamviews.com/lucid-drea...ess-brain.html
The brain uses the same mechanisms, if a bit less intensely, that would usually be steering and coordinating running, say.
If there wasn't REM atonia, which is regulated in the pons (brain-stem), then you would act out your dreams physically. Upon damage to certain areas of the pons, this atonia ceases to work, and you actually do labour about in bed. Not a good night's relaxing sleep, now would it be?

It is costly in terms of energy and unfavourable for any animal - I could list a lot of reasons, why this would be so from the top of my head. Imagine a mouse pedalling about in her sleeping hole for long stretches of time and an owl hearing it...

Now movements like rolling over in your nonREM sleep are actually useful and unconsciously controlled, for example to better the sleeping position, if you come to lie in a way that constricts your blood-flow for example - as you say.

Dolphins present an exception, they seem to sleep with half their brain, as shown by EEG studies, and don't have SP - possibly to be able to go for air and have a look out for predators, the corresponding eye to the non-sleeping hemisphere is often open as well. Do they dream? Unclear, as far as I remember, but there is something akin to REM.
Very curious and interesting - there's a lot to be found out still about the evolution of sleep in general and dreaming in particular.

My speculation as to the "purpose" of dreaming, and not only mine: it's a simulation-space primarily for practising for real life. Fully scenic hallucinations presenting you with a virtual reality, your very own holodeck, if you will - and the full potential of this situation can be enjoyed in LDs.
There is evidence for and also evidence, which rather contradicts the idea of "it's for practising": Evolutionary function of dreams: A test of the threat simulation theory in recurrent dreams. - ResearchGate


How would you define dreams and SP and explain their existence, characterize their features and implications?

Originally Posted by summertime

could it be, that the soul and consciousness (pure awareness without thought)are one and the same? i think so.
take a look at this surgeon talking about a patient he performed surgery on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JL1oDuvQR08

I'm not so sure about this random youtube video, im not sure about that dactor. The video is also skipping, things could be taken out of context. And just in general this is not a very credible source. To address what you're saying... possible? Sure why not. Likely? Not so much. But just to be clear the soul has always been considered the consciousness as far as I knew... a soul is a consciousness seperate from any body.

Again in this video, this man deals with near dead. Pronounced dead doesn't even mean you're actually dead, just that they can't detect a pulse. And regardless... if one hallucinates predeath, and then awakens and either continues the hallucination with a resolution to it coming back to life or whatever, or just straight up the hallucination isn't happening as soon as you come back to life. If there was a lapse of NOTHINGNESS, in between the hallucinating before dying, and coming back to life. One might percieve the hallucination as DURING the lapse of nothingness. Because they simply didn't realize there was a gap of consciousness in the first place. To be sure, the woman in my link? She simply didn't realize anything had happened beyond a sudden skip in perception. But to someone hallucinating, percieving any such skip would be unlikely. They'd hallucinate... and then bleep out of existence... and then come back only remember the hallucination right beforehand and whatever happens now that they're awake.

By the way you can find loads of people saying they saw an afterlife, near death or after pronounced dead. The hilarious part is that none of their stories match up. Some people have their beliefs "verified", some have beliefs they never agreed with "verified" and in general we have people all over the world saying different gods and afterlives are seen during these sorts of experiences. Thus ultimately making it way more likely, that it's all just information from their brain going haywire.

Originally Posted by Verre

Agreed... but true skepticism is all too rare. A genuine skeptic is capable of doubting even what seems most irrefutably certain.

A genuine skeptic accepts that we're just little animals trying to make sense of things, but the sense we make of our experiences is probably a very poor match for the vast intricacy of the universe.

A genuine skeptic acknowledges the drawbacks and limitations of science as well as the flaws and irrationality of faith. To do any less is simply to trade one form of zealotry for another, while projecting the same self-righteousness enjoyed by zealots of all kinds, because it makes them feel superior to people with different ideas.

Genuine skepticism produces profound humility, not pride and contempt.

I concur with DeviantThinker. And being one of those assholes I can personally testify that I don't think skepticism is very important when it comes to TRIVIAL matters and situations. I believe it's crucial with the nontrivial though. But maybe I'm not trying to be perfect 100% of the time, only when it really matters. Also I believe shock factor and challenging things is also crucial. It all depends, and also some people are better converters than others are better destroyers. Some people are meant to change minds, others simply subdue the ones that are especially resilient. Also, contempt has a place in painting the narrative. It's important to frame the truth behind the opposition and sometimes the truth isn't pretty.

Now if I would actually explain my method? I actually am a person who talks a lot in absolute, not because I am infallible and my position can't be swayed. But the most logical position is the MOST true. The MOST certain. The MOST absolute. I mean anything a human spews is NOT those things, inherently so... but they are the closest we have to them. We should always treat the edge of our limits, the best of the best... as such.

@Anok

Creationists don't submit to peer review in the first place, in fact they actively dodge it. Thus factually, making it NOT SCIENCE. It's psuedoscience. Not only is Evolution a fact that is so well substantiated and verified that nothing can compete, but Creationism has not a single shred of valid evidence and in fact has been disproven time and time again.

You acknowledge what the scientific method is. So I'll grant you that what you're claiming is that simply, the majority may not always be using the scientific method. In the dark ages? Easily. But even then science pulled humans out of there kicking and screaming. And this was an era when like you said, a person could get murdered or imprisoned. These were barbaric times... we now live in a world where plenty of places would NEVER do that sort of thing no matter how much you're pissing the majority of people off with your ideas. And eventually the entire world will be like this across the board. The game has changes completely, even if science could stand to use better support from humans it's still more powerful than ever before. Not to mention that back when stuff like that could happen, that gave scientists all the reason to be like "shut up" to their own, to protect themselves. You know... so that genius next to them doesn't get them screwed over and dead or in jail. Now there is no such thing, you can express your curiosities and ideas freely. I never see it happen, it seems unbelievable in today's society because you would have to argue that the vast majority of scientists are ALL corrupt. NOT the scientific method itself, because that is incorruptible. It cannot be corrupted, the closest you can get is by a psuedoscientific method that isn't the legit method.

But going back a little... the biggest thing is that even if the majority of scientists were corrupt. That says NOTHING about the validity of the scientific method itself. And I disagree completely on when, where and how skepticism is in it's ideal form. Or that is to say, I disagree with when, where and how the scientific method itself is also ideal. I believe we humans need a social control system, in the past this was violence... and then rumors and ostracism... and then religion. In human civilization, religion is what keeps people in check. Well it used to, now it's massively run it's course... and what is to take it's place? Skepticism, along with the scientific method and other tools that commonly go hand in hand.

And it really depends man, most claims can straight up go against well established facts without the necessary validity to overthrow said established facts. In your case, all I'm hearing is that nothing of this sort has actually passed peer review. There might be quite a bit to what you're saying, but even if that is so again... it's ultimately not here nor there when it comes to the scientific method so lastly I will say that... if you're so bent on corruption of the majority of scientists against certain claims. Supply the claims, show how it's been falsified or not yet. Then show the corruption. Basically, show the corruption by way of the scientific method.

Originally Posted by Hukif

*snip*

"We don't know how the universe works"
I make no claims on the extent to which we do, but yes we do.

"but needing a reason for everything is not going to work. We don't need a reason for the universe to start"
I mean we kinda DO need a reason for the universe to start... at least a /how/ reason if we exclude "why" questions. We need an explanation for how it started, how it works. And yes needing a reason for things up until this point, is the only thing that has worked as well as it does. Nothing compares.

You're just waving a lot of "no needs" around so uh. I'm just going to move along.

Originally Posted by Verre

It is unfortunate that the denunciation of absolutism is too often perceived as a defense of relativism--another false dichotomy. Of course we should all be doing our very best to make rational judgments based on available evidence, and of course some judgments are better than others at evaluating and explaining the facts at hand.

The trouble is that, whether as individuals or as a society, we seem to be pretty bad at evaluating our own judgments. As individuals we are prone to strong confirmation bias, no matter how ridiculous our beliefs might seem to other people. As a society, our dominant beliefs are constantly shifting.

Today's dogma is tomorrow's hogwash. A hundred years ago, racist beliefs were supported by a very detailed scientific framework that has now been thoroughly discredited. A hundred years ago, manufacturers were adding radium--radium!--to products like lipstick, chocolate, and chicken feed, until it became impossible to ignore that people were dying from it. A hundred years ago, Freud wrote The Interpretation of Dreams, a book that doesn't have much to offer modern dreamers except as a historical curiosity.

So yes, we should be putting forth our best efforts to make rational judgments based on available evidence, but more than a little humility is still warranted, because in a hundred years people will look back and laugh at how silly and misguided we were in 2014. (Also, they'll say we dressed funny and had poor taste in music.)

I don't denounce absolutism outright and I'll admit that bluntly right here and now. I agree almost completely with Darkmatters, which @Darkmatters is why I've seemingly ignored you. I HAVEN'T, I just agree so much that I have nothing to add. Except where I want to explain that... it doesn't have to be a trap to champion an extreme. The real trap is getting stuck on one side. But in the same way that you're right... it's good to take a middle ground. But the grey area has intensity too, the middle ground has championing too. You can champion both sides at the same time, they are not always in conflict with each other... I mean hey, there wouldn't be a middle ground in the first place. The way I roll is, wherever I stand I turn the depth up to max. I'm going as deep with it as I can without things falling apart.

Back at Verre specifically... humility will not save you from looking silly and misguided, it won't stop you from looking however you were going to look. Everybody ends up looking good to some and bad to others. Sure this varies drastically but ultimately I don't even care as long as I did my best and I believe I am doing my best humility or not. Besides it's important to remember that when everything is so much bigger than you, you shouldn't care so much about where you end up in all of it as opposed to where you are in the present moment. Chillax man, enjoy life before all else.

Originally Posted by StephL

I'll come back to some other points made in this thread - just for now:



While I agree, that IronicSkeptic's speculation on the purpose of SP has no argumentative value against an existence of other worlds to be visited in dreams, because it doesn't pertain to it, it does make perfect sense in principle and on it's own.

*snip*

You've said exactly what I was meaning to in regards to that. But I think it DOES pertain to what I was saying. All you did was patch up the holes in what I was saying, though I never meant for it to actually be the real reason for SP I just meant that's an idea I've heard. What I meant was, that the fact of Evolution shows that we have the tools we do, SP included... for survival. So how the hell does entering another world fit?

The idea of entering other worlds in dreams does not fit at all with science in many different respects!
There has been some kuddelmuddel with names as well, and I just deleted a post, where I claimed, I wasn't even referring to you and what you said, IronicAtheist - don't ask me - I can't understand it in hindsight any more now...
But you're right - SP is relevant and pertaining to the argument - I just didn't see a direct reasoning as to why SP having an evolutionary background would necessarily contradict the idea of these other worlds.
In my view understanding and accepting the concept of evolution and thinking through it's logical implications with intellectual honesty should almost automatically lead to having to drop religious, superstitious or dualistic views of human nature, though. This view is reason enough to not outright deny the connection. I'll write a bit more on why I think this is so, once I find the time.

I should indeed take a bit more time and care when reading and posting, also when it's not my "planned post". I'm sorry - looks like a deliberate affront to me in hindsight and wasn't at all meant like that.

By the way - after reading all you wrote in the meantime, I came to throw away a lot of my draft for a longer post, because you made many of the points I was about to make and better than I would have done myself.

One last nitpick: "Creationists don't submit to peer review in the first place, in fact they actively dodge it. Thus factually, making it NOT SCIENCE. It's psuedoscience." I will say that you can in fact do perfectally valid science without peer review. The purpose of peer reviewing is to help establish the validity of a claim for the group but you can still establish the validity of a claim for yourself in isolation. The scientific method works on an individual as well as social level. (No argument that creation "science" is pseudoscience though, that can not be seriously disputed)

Now for a more relevent point: my main evolutionary issue with the prospect of shared dreaming is that it is just not plausible for it to evolve according to natural selection's restrictions. Something like sleep paralysis can be incrementally useful across all stages in it's development from a minor slackening of the muscles to the near complete shutdown we see today. At no point in the evolutionary history of the sleep paralysis adaptation does it have anything less than positive utility. It's telling that the only part of the body that is not paralysed is the one which would experience negative utility from the adaption, the eyes.

Now let's take the hypothethical adaptation of shared dreaming. At first, this seems like it has obvious utility: it would expose us to new neural patterns and possibly even nocturnal socialising free of the dangers of dilly-dallying about outside where the tigers prowl for flesh. However, consider what the first incremental step towards this adaptation would introduce. Not new knowledge, not telepathy but simply an increase in background noise. This noise would have at best no advantageous effects and at worse would lead to disturbed sleep or even trigger nightmares. Any primates who took the first few incremental steps on the long road to shared dreaming would be out competed by their peers unburdened by this noise. Hence shared dreaming could not plausibly naturally evolve. It's kind of how there has never been a creature that has naturally evolved wheels for appendages despite plenty of natural terrain that would work for it.

Wow, this thread has suddenly taken on a life of its own!!

Ironic, I want to make it clear that I don't advocate taking the middle ground either, because that would just be a third mindless alternative. It would be like saying "Ok, there's an extreme on the right and one on the left, so I'll just stand right here in the middle" - that would essentially just be refusing to take sides, fence-straddling. In fact I deliberately avoided using the term middle ground or moderate. Instead I believe in taking the arguments apart item by item and deciding where you stand on each item - on some you may be all the way at one extreme or the other, in fact you may be at one extreme on some issues and the opposite extreme on others, and somewhere in between on others.

On the issue raised in the last paragraph above - the possibility of evolutionary advantages of dream sharing…

What if it wasn't just dream sharing, but telepathy in general, when awake or asleep. To me it seems like the kind of thing that might actually work better via the unconscious, which thinks holistically and symbolically, as opposed to the conscious, which is better for analysis but not so good for synthesis. What if feelings and vague symbolic imagery can be shared easier than complex thoughts in the form of words and numbers? In that case it would make sense for it to be much more noticeable in dreams, when the pesky and loud conscious circuitry is offline and the unconscious is allowed to do its thing unencumbered, to be later recalled and interpreted by the conscious (though that might not be necessary - telepathy might function in a vague and holistic way with no need for precision or language).

I'm not saying I have any actual belief in this, I just like the idea and it seems to jibe with the way the conscious and unconscious work anyway - the really important stuff is handled unconsciously because the conscious is far too slow - in fact I see the conscious mind as basically a redundant circuit the purpose of which is to subject unconscious decisions to better analysis after the fact.

IronicSkeptic: It seems that we have a misunderstanding. I never said anything about creationism. I, in fact, lauded evolution as a theory that has prevailed against the opinion of past majorities, and then pointed out how an example you used in your original post was implausible for reasons dependent on our knowledge of evolution, i.e. mammals experience REM, we, as human mammals are related to other mammals which likely were underground when they were asleep, or lying in a patch of grass somewhere, in no danger of falling. I am unsure how creationism came up and am wondering if you were assuming that I hold opinions that I do not when you read my post.

I also did not intend for you to come away thinking that my point was that "the majority may not always be using the scientific method." I certainly agree, but I also agree with you that for the most part scientists are doing just fine with the scientific method, as evidenced by our great progress of late. No, I intended for you to come away with my point that much skepticism suffers from the fallacy that "argument with the majority view of the scientific community is inherently irrational," because that is the fallacy that I believe you to be propagating.

It is only fair that I justify that belief. You wish to be a rationalist, and since I have this in common with you, I think that is good. We apparently hold different beliefs, which as rationalists we may (ideally) see as an opportunity to debate with each other and dispel each other's misconceptions. However, I read your post and find that, although it is a critique of irrationality, it itself is littered with the irrational, and relies strongly on irrational argument. Your tone is mocking, you go off on a rant about how, if dreams occur in other worlds, the dreamers must often be criminal - which is not actually a rational argument against the phenomena. What's more, you present possibilities like that as if your interpretation of these concepts is the only option. Why should it be the only option? Would it not be more rational to do a bit of research on what has traditionally been believed about the things you are critiquing? I am fairly certain you have not done so, because I have only heard of the dream world described as you have described it from random people on the internet, and never in a more coherent -ism that has stood the test of time. This is not to say this makes these -isms more valid, just that you clearly have either nitpicked the worst argument instead of taking on more serious ones, or else have little to no experience with these systems in the first place.

That said, it is true that I "know what you mean." When you say things like what you said about sleep paralysis, I get that your general argument is that there is no apparent evolutionary advantage to dream worlds and the like. Of course, I also have no reason to simply let it slide that you are appealing to logic rather illogically. How should I know whether you have jumped to your right to say "whatever" to obvious pseudoscience when I can realistically infer from your arguments that you have misconceptions, at least about the concepts you are critiquing? This is why I oppose your "destroy" as opposed to "convert" mentality.

Finally, I never implied that the majority was corrupt. I explained a very real phenomenon in the scientific community; research into controversial areas, when those controversial areas are against the majority view, is very difficult to conduct for reasons strictly relating to prestige and grants. Since opinions and economies do not know what scientific inquiry, science suffers from this phenomenon. This has nothing to do with corruption and everything to do with unfortunate economics. The other phenomenon that I explained was the one whereby otherwise rational people get so hung up on thinking they are right that they cease to use rational argument, and do things like argue that the results can’t possibly be due to telepathy because telepathy doesn’t exist. This is the unfortunate point where would-be skeptics are most at risk of contributing to pseudoscience, simply because they find something unbelievable. The same kind of thing happened multiple times when people were getting evidence that bats used echolocation to navigate; this truth was buried for a long time due to simple incredulity.

That is enough critique for me, I really don't like critiquing people and I really don't harbor anything against you, to be clear. But it seems that you seriously misconstrued where I am coming from and what I was trying to say to you.

Now I'm done with the critique and want to make that post about how there are much better conceptual frameworks for the things you are critiquing than you are apparently aware of.

First, I'd like to start with your idea that "a brain can wireless subconsciously contact other brains," because it relates quite well to one of the most supported topics of the parapsychology community: telepathy. As a matter of fact, parapsychology may have been the study of telepathy because people occasionally consciously believe that it is occurring from time to time, but the actual data which parapsychologists adamantly claim is significant is largely unconscious. This means that telepathy is, properly understood, a usually-unconscious phenomenon which happens to be experienced consciously on occasion (like, say, REM atonia or changes of heart rate).

Furthermore, telepathic communication is not 100% effective. As an example, in experiments where a telepathic "receiver" in an experimental condition of sensory deprivation was to choose between 1 of 4 possible "sent" images based on their experience during deprivation, they score ~7% above chance. This is small, yes, and if these people are intentionally putting themselves into passive, receptive altered states of consciousness in order to notice a subtle phenomenon, then it is EXTREMELY unlikely that most people will experience this phenomenon accurately and consciously enough that they will be convinced it is not just chance.

But under these conditions, it is not just chance. The 7% number comes from a cumulative statistical analysis of 88 experiments conducted by scientists making a serious effort to be scientific and professional, consisting of ~3000 sessions. The odds that the number is due to chance are ridiculously small. But, as I have been trying to explain, there is a prejudice against this line of inquiry, and a popular annoyance that such experiments are conducted, and a general lack of funding for novel or better equipped research... a shame, because the most valid claims against such studies I have encountered are lack of replication and state of the art equipment to reduce error.

But I digress! The fact of the matter is that if you are willing to entertain the possibility of telepathic effects, then dream worlds, out of body experiences, and shared dreaming are all coherent within a telepathic model. Firstly, if telepathy is largely unconscious, and in experimental settings can be interpreted more consciously when sensory deprivation and altered states of consciousness are employed, then conscious sleep phenomena during neurochemical-induced sensory deprivation is, quite rationally, a fantastic candidate for the experience of telepathic effects.

Of course it is not normally that great because people often don't remember any dreams, usually don't remember as many as they could, have been "skeptically" conditioned to attach little meaning to them, and are very rarely lucid. But in principle, telepathy should be more noticeable in dreams, and it is a reasonable hypothesis that a lucid dreamer may have an unparalleled conscious access to telepathic perceptions.

Shared Dreams, Dream World(s), OBE, and a Telepathic Model
In well-developed systems I have encountered, a "dream world" almost never is conceptualized as you conceptualize it in your original post, like some distant and alien physical world. It is usually conceptualized as a part of normal reality that is simply on a different regime or perhaps composed of a different substance that is not yet well understood. In a telepathic model, the regime would be the human mind, and its substance would be something conductive of phenomenal experience. Shared dreaming is a necessary precursor to such a dream world.

If "a brain can wireless subconsciously contact other brains," and evidence suggests that this contact is synchronized thinking, and this contact occurs in a dream, this would constitute shared dreaming. There might even be a difference of what exactly is communicated, leaving a slight margin of error in two reports of the same shared dream. Although we would need to assume that completely different accounts showed no evidence of a shared dream, there is nothing precluding the possibility that one dreamer was a bad receiver, while the other was a very good receiver (or lucid dreamer, or whatever).

What would preclude multiple brains' interaction in this way? Until someone can give me a good reason, it seems reasonable to speculate that group "conversations" can also occur. Perhaps this is limited in some way by the proximity of brains to one another (some parapsychologists disagree, but I don't mind). If that is so, then space truly exists in the dream world, but is dependent not on physical space, but on localization of humans in that physical space... and even then there is nothing to preclude distant contact with others, since your "wireless" brains don't seem too different in principle from wireless telephones, to me, with which I can call someone from across the world.

And as far as out of body experiences, you actually did my work for me there. What precludes us from experiencing each others' memories? In fact, if both telepathy and stored memory are largely unconscious most of the time, they're practically in bed with one another already. Interestingly, this idea would account for both the errors of perception reported by many people who have actually experienced OBEs, as well as the less common reports of objectively verifiable perception from OBEs, because memories of real experiences, while imperfect, tend towards reality, and if you are receiving telepathic input from multiple sources about a real place, error of perception should be reduced.

And of course, since the substance of this world is based on human thought, it is malleable to human experience. But this does not make us "GOD" as you point out. I am sure you are aware by now how difficult it actually is to control lucid dreams effectively, and if you ever decide to try for OBEs to see if the claims that the experiences are markedly different have validity, I am sure you will find this to be even more complicated - which is predicted by a telepathic model of these phenomena by the necessity of someone being a good telepathic receiver to experience anything I have been talking about, and not just a normal lucid dream in your own brain, composed of your own experiences.

Of course, because double-blind studies have been so useful to strictly physical science, it's easy to make fun of the notion that the participant should be blinded but that the research confederates should all be as informed as possible. It's almost as uncomfortable as the notion that, if consciousness plays such a role in psi, researchers who are prejudiced against the notion of its existence are more likely to produced contaminated reproductions of experiments.

But anyways, that is my explanation of the phenomena that you originally critiqued, based on a model grown from the seed of a concept that you deemed potentially plausible, which, whether you knew it or not, is one of the most supported phenomena in all of parapsychology. I do not necessarily believe in any of it, but it is in line with what I think you were saying might be plausible, and I am inclined to agree that it is a possibility.

I still think there's something to be said about the physicalist philosophy behind current sciences not accounting for phenomenal consciousness stuff like qualia but I'm tired of typing for now, haha.

MMmmmmmmkay… another one who agrees with me but refuses to acknowledge my existence…

On the off chance that somebody notices one of my posts and deigns to actually respond to it - I don't understand how that constitutes another world that dreamers enter into? The way you described it it sounds like exactly what dreaming is already thought to be - simulated environments created on the fly by the unconscious around the dream self. How is it in any way an actual world that people enter into when dreaming?

Originally Posted by IronicAtheist

I make no claims on the extent to which we do, but yes we do.

I mean we kinda DO need a reason for the universe to start... at least a /how/ reason if we exclude "why" questions. We need an explanation for how it started, how it works. And yes needing a reason for things up until this point, is the only thing that has worked as well as it does. Nothing compares.

You're just waving a lot of "no needs" around so uh. I'm just going to move along.

I was referring to universe creation, obviously... we know from big-bang onwards and its inner works, thought that was obvious considering the thread lol

Wait wait, what kind of reason are you referring to? I'm talking about the spiritual kind where there must be a reason for a universe/life/humans to exist to make our life meaningful. We have a how for after it starts with big bang and we know how it works after that, I am referring before that because again the thread. I thought it would be obvious, considering you said that "life is without purpose" and that is just how I was referring to a universe starting, it being without any apriori purpose/out of the blue. Or are you perhaps saying that some sort of energy with a mind created it for a certain reason we are unaware of?

Also the no-needs are part of a greater scheme! It is no fun to play like that... for example your morality point was moot considering we rape and slaughter other species in this universe. In a scenario where we visit other universes there is no need for humans of this side to respect creatures who may or may not be of the same specie.

I was just bringing up the scenario of multiple-universes, but it seems that you want it restricted to another universe that works like this one with either powers or dementia from the dreamer.

Have you considered the event where connecting to another world, much like this one would allow the sleeping creature to feel a more real experience of the world while not wasting any energy? This seems like a huge help compared to those who, despite not using energy during dreams/sleep are not gaining any "real" experience either while asleep because the construction of their brains is just that innacurate.

I'm still pondering about your initial post.You ask why there aren't other creatures poping here by the same method; and then I wonder why we as humans would see them coming exactly to this very planet in a universe so vast or why exactly the stuff they "control" would be visible to us given the dementia scenario.

I am an atheist and don't believe in a greater thing making a world for us, neither do I believe in shared dreaming so what do you expect me(others?) to use if not the scenario you propose? It also seems like proposing a different one is out of the question so this is confusing as hell to me without asking.

Ah, Darkmatters... I'm sorry. I did skip over your post initially because I wanted to reply to IronicSkeptic's addressing me and it took so long to type that I took a break.

I actually think it's fantastic that we're on the same wavelength as far as the potential for telepathy goes. It is interesting that we both came to the same conclusion that telepathy might work better in non-conscious states.

To address your point: Telepathy like this would constitute another world in the same way that the internet constitutes another world. It is actually quite similar because our experience of the internet and our experience of "space" in dreams is not dependent on space so much as it is on information. We could attempt to define the internet in terms of physical space by noting that it takes time for electricity to travel to transmit information, but I would argue that we can NOT define internet-space this way, because if information never reaches the point of being displayed to us, it does not exist in that node of the internet at all. Dream control, especially the practice of preventing unwanted random stuff from happening, could be described as an analogous phenomena. Here, the dreamer's conscious faculty is a "node" of the dream world, they are " closest" to the information which is consciously present to them, a little "farther" from relevant information that they are still likely to associate to because of relevance to what they are experiencing "here," and very distant from information that is irrelevant.

If we are speculating on telepathy, we must consider another conscious being to radiate information, somehow. Whatever that "how" is, anything that increases the probability of receiving that radiant information is the telepathic dream world's equivalent of approaching a point in space.

I am not really troubled by how different this is from physical space, any more than I am troubled by electrons behaving differently from people, because like people arise from the interactions of lots of electrons and fellow subatomic particles, this dream world might emerge from lots of people's telepathic interactions. Whether it is an "actual" world depends on your opinion of what actuality is. As far as I am concerned no measurement has ever been made without a scientist experiencing information in order to record that measurement. So, I do not see a world based on information exchange through non-traditional mediums as any less "actual..." personally.

Sorry again for skipping you!

I have yet to encounter persuasive evidence for "dream sharing" as it is conventionally described, but I ran across this article the other day that seems to relate to some of the ideas that Anok was raising. The results are surprising given that there was no personal contact between the dreamers and the person they were supposed to dream about, only a photograph. Then again, however distinct they may be from one another, in their own ways dreams and photographs are both forms of representation.

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

MMmmmmmmkay… another one who agrees with me but refuses to acknowledge my existence…

On the off chance that somebody notices one of my posts and deigns to actually respond to it - I don't understand how that constitutes another world that dreamers enter into? The way you described it it sounds like exactly what dreaming is already thought to be - simulated environments created on the fly by the unconscious around the dream self. How is it in any way an actual world that people enter into when dreaming?

I've recently heard of the concept of persistant realms where you can enter dream worlds that have completely consistant laws that you can't break, events occur idependantly of your conscious attention and you can re-enter these worlds right from where you left off last time you slept. While persistant simulated worlds are far more plausible than visiting literal worlds in your dreams, I find myself a tad skeptical if this is really possible. Has anyone here experienced persistant realsm and if so, what are the steps to enter one. I may try once I am reasonably persistant at lucid dreaming and stablization.

Darkmatters - you do exist!!
I just don't find a lot of objectionable things in your posts - except that I can't quite see, how you manage to fit telepathy into your world-view which otherwise seems based in evolutionary thinking.

I almost feel like apologizing, that I'm not in the mood of expounding on my view on evolution clashing with supernaturalism in more detail right now, as I had announced, nor take on more posts, as I had planned to do. Just one thing - why don't we see telepathy effecting animal behaviour? Is it something uniquely human? We don't see relevant effects of it in humans, either, for that matter - if minds would do this - the world would be a very different place...

But heck, rambling about in here is a hobby after all - this is what I did feel like writing - here goes:

Originally Posted by Anok

First, I'd like to start with your idea that "a brain can wireless subconsciously contact other brains," because it relates quite well to one of the most supported topics of the parapsychology community: telepathy. As a matter of fact, parapsychology may have been the study of telepathy because people occasionally consciously believe that it is occurring from time to time, but the actual data which parapsychologists adamantly claim is significant is largely unconscious. This means that telepathy is, properly understood, a usually-unconscious phenomenon which happens to be experienced consciously on occasion (like, say, REM atonia or changes of heart rate).

Okay - what I was reading through your trying to argue against IronicAtheist (not "IronicSkeptic" ), was that you think SP to be something other than an evolutionarily useful protection-mechanism. Now you say, it constitutes a conscious experience related to telepathy/wireless-somethings going on, do I get that correctly? I've been asking you to tell me, what you actually meant to express by arguing against his example of dreamers potentially falling out of trees - do you dismiss my take on it as well?
I ask you again - please let us know, how you conceptualize SP!



Besides this curiosity - what you do here, is acknowledge, that there has been parapsychological research going on, and indeed it has. It's not so, that people, who want to do science around this topic are unable to do so for lack of money and because of of the connected stigma. There's more than a century of ongoings to be re-viewed, and more of a century of critique and debunking has been going on as well.
So to say that it's the fault of modern science not taking the topic seriously and hence we have no good data is moot.
What about those data, which parapsychologists adamantly claim?
Given the fact, that in order to accommodate the idea of this wireless communication you needed to find a whole new branch of physics in order to find the medium, besides a whole new field of neuroscience in order to find encoding/sending/receiving mechanisms - you need a very, very good reason in order to go about searching for those, wouldn't you say?

And to all my knowledge, and considering, that the endeavour didn't start yesterday, there is no such thing as convincing evidence to the effect, that this phenomenon actually exists, consciously or unconsciously, awake or asleep - anywhere.

You are the one - it looks so at least - to make an extraordinary claim. What would be needed to go on discussing the matter would be actual data, studies including how exactly they have been set up and what methods of analysis have been brought to bear.
You say, you are a scientist yourself - so I suppose, you are well aware of the fact, that it is all too easy to come to almost any conclusion you like by either consciously or unconsciously manipulating data - flaws in study-setup and procedure, like not double-blinding, using statistics in incompetent or plain dishonest ways etc.

What you can't claim, is that the scientific community ultimately rejects proper data on the basis of dogmatic thinking. If they do so when they see data that seemingly show something, which they don't believe, or don't want to believe, we are all humans after all - they go about trying to debunk it. And most of the time this works. But sometimes it doesn't and that's why lucid dreaming is now established scientific fact, and an extremely interesting one at that, so that more and more studies are being done these days, esp. in Germany by the way. "We", as in the scientific community, also have come to realize that hypnosis is more than simple suggestibility and hokuspokus - it's an actually different state of mind, discernible on EEG. This was exactly the stuff, classical science has been initially reacting allergically to, but meanwhile both phenomena are fully accepted as real throughout the community.
So why not with parapsychology as well - after more than a century of feverish activity? Because it can't be shown to work, what is there can get debunked and/or isn't repeatable.
It's up to you to present me with what you consider relevant evidence, before it makes sense to further get into it.

Furthermore, telepathic communication is not 100% effective. As an example, in experiments where a telepathic "receiver" in an experimental condition of sensory deprivation was to choose between 1 of 4 possible "sent" images based on their experience during deprivation, they score ~7% above chance. This is small, yes, and if these people are intentionally putting themselves into passive, receptive altered states of consciousness in order to notice a subtle phenomenon, then it is EXTREMELY unlikely that most people will experience this phenomenon accurately and consciously enough that they will be convinced it is not just chance.

But under these conditions, it is not just chance. The 7% number comes from a cumulative statistical analysis of 88 experiments conducted by scientists making a serious effort to be scientific and professional, consisting of ~3000 sessions. The odds that the number is due to chance are ridiculously small. But, as I have been trying to explain, there is a prejudice against this line of inquiry, and a popular annoyance that such experiments are conducted, and a general lack of funding for novel or better equipped research... a shame, because the most valid claims against such studies I have encountered are lack of replication and state of the art equipment to reduce error.

Please provide us with a source - how can we talk about data, without knowing how they came to be gathered and analysed?!

But I digress! The fact of the matter is that if you are willing to entertain the possibility of telepathic effects, then dream worlds, out of body experiences, and shared dreaming are all coherent within a telepathic model. Firstly, if telepathy is largely unconscious, and in experimental settings can be interpreted more consciously when sensory deprivation and altered states of consciousness are employed, then conscious sleep phenomena during neurochemical-induced sensory deprivation is, quite rationally, a fantastic candidate for the experience of telepathic effects.

"If you are willing to entertain" - yep - in order to entertain such a thing - I would need clear and non-ambivalent evidence, which shows me, I'm not wasting my time!

Of course it is not normally that great because people often don't remember any dreams, usually don't remember as many as they could, have been "skeptically" conditioned to attach little meaning to them, and are very rarely lucid. But in principle, telepathy should be more noticeable in dreams, and it is a reasonable hypothesis that a lucid dreamer may have an unparalleled conscious access to telepathic perceptions.

Sceptically conditioned? You would probably be very surprised, how many "sceptical" lucid dreamers are roaming around on this site alone. I was, to be honest. Anyway - scepticism and disregarding dreams as such is not exactly going hand in hand - not at all, actually. What does go hand in hand is doubting up to out-right denying any supernatural properties of dreams - of anything for that matter. And that on good grounds in my view.

Shared Dreams, Dream World(s), OBE, and a Telepathic Model
In well-developed systems I have encountered, a "dream world" almost never is conceptualized as you conceptualize it in your original post, like some distant and alien physical world. It is usually conceptualized as a part of normal reality that is simply on a different regime or perhaps composed of a different substance that is not yet well understood. In a telepathic model, the regime would be the human mind, and its substance would be something conductive of phenomenal experience. Shared dreaming is a necessary precursor to such a dream world.

Now that's interesting - I have seen quite many attempts at "a well developed system" fall on their faces. So if you know of any note-worthy conceptual frameworks, making conclusive sense of such phenomena, at least internally - please present them to us!

If "a brain can wireless subconsciously contact other brains," and evidence suggests that this contact is synchronized thinking, and this contact occurs in a dream, this would constitute shared dreaming. There might even be a difference of what exactly is communicated, leaving a slight margin of error in two reports of the same shared dream. Although we would need to assume that completely different accounts showed no evidence of a shared dream, there is nothing precluding the possibility that one dreamer was a bad receiver, while the other was a very good receiver (or lucid dreamer, or whatever).

This sort of reasoning smacks of non-scientific thinking - what about interpreting no evidence for a specific dream having been shared as - it hasn't been shared? I'm not saying, it is inconceivable that there is a phenomenon of bad/good receiving - what I say is that your way of putting it sets my confirmation-bias alarms off.

What would preclude multiple brains' interaction in this way? Until someone can give me a good reason, it seems reasonable to speculate that group "conversations" can also occur. Perhaps this is limited in some way by the proximity of brains to one another (some parapsychologists disagree, but I don't mind). If that is so, then space truly exists in the dream world, but is dependent not on physical space, but on localization of humans in that physical space... and even then there is nothing to preclude distant contact with others, since your "wireless" brains don't seem too different in principle from wireless telephones, to me, with which I can call someone from across the world.

And as far as out of body experiences, you actually did my work for me there. What precludes us from experiencing each others' memories? In fact, if both telepathy and stored memory are largely unconscious most of the time, they're practically in bed with one another already. Interestingly, this idea would account for both the errors of perception reported by many people who have actually experienced OBEs, as well as the less common reports of objectively verifiable perception from OBEs, because memories of real experiences, while imperfect, tend towards reality, and if you are receiving telepathic input from multiple sources about a real place, error of perception should be reduced.

First of all - think back to DeviantThinker's thoughts on "noise". So this is supposedly almost all going on unconsciously - how would you tune in to somebody? This is a general problem - there are so many assumptions which have to be claimed ad hoc for this whole thing to fly, it's mind-boggling.
Then another thing, an argument, I have made somewhere else in more detail and might try and dig out again.
You are saying, that esp. in lucid dreams, it's possible to steer this to an extent, or even specifically so that you can enter somebody's dreamworld, or meet in some sort of common psychic sphere of existence - and you can communicate, you can influence people. Wouldn't it be logical to propose, that if this possibility existed, there would have been all through history evil masters of this craft? If you can share dreams of a person, you didn't ask beforehand - you can "invade dreams", too, right? Cause nightmares, make them afraid of and obedient to you in real life, haunting them?
Where are the records of that? Wouldn't culture in general have noticed if communion of this kind would be going on, but esp. the "black sheep" and their effects?
I'll leave it at that for now - but sender-receiver identification/location/noise-free tuning in are extremely difficult to propose, and you won't be able to deny the abuse-potential for the whole affair as well.
Your thoughts? Is "dream-invasion" and causing havoc in other people's unconscious minds possible - yes or no?

And of course, since the substance of this world is based on human thought, it is malleable to human experience. But this does not make us "GOD" as you point out. I am sure you are aware by now how difficult it actually is to control lucid dreams effectively, and if you ever decide to try for OBEs to see if the claims that the experiences are markedly different have validity, I am sure you will find this to be even more complicated - which is predicted by a telepathic model of these phenomena by the necessity of someone being a good telepathic receiver to experience anything I have been talking about, and not just a normal lucid dream in your own brain, composed of your own experiences.

This is of course not an "of course" - how scientific of you to claim knowing what the substance of the world actually is! Last I heard it was about QM, RT and Chromodynamics...
Besides - yes - there are people who can do anything they want in lucid dreams. Would you please provide us with an example, as to what is impossible in LDs in your opinion, which would thus demonstrate that one does not have godlike powers in LDs?
The markedly different experiential qualities of a WILD with starting out in the logical place, lying in your bed, and then making use of your pre-set schema of such affairs, namely solving "yourself" out of your "physical body" seem to be well explainable. For once - you don't get lucid in a dream, which had you un-self-conscious directly before, but you come directly from waking consciousness and such a higher degree of lucidity and realism tend to follow. That connected with expectations as to the special nature of the event is completely sufficient here.

Of course, because double-blind studies have been so useful to strictly physical science, it's easy to make fun of the notion that the participant should be blinded but that the research confederates should all be as informed as possible. It's almost as uncomfortable as the notion that, if consciousness plays such a role in psi, researchers who are prejudiced against the notion of its existence are more likely to produced contaminated reproductions of experiments.

Look - if you are going to refer to only singly blinded studies - I will indeed dismiss them. Are you aware of Dr. Persinger and his god-helmet for example? I've come to look into his affairs a bit more intensely in another context, and that's exactly where his results went to pot. Especially when it is about consciousness, it is absolutely necessary, it's crucial to double blind anything - this effect of the one conducting experiments being in the know has been demonstrated to death - if you can't exclude this as the source of the effect - you have nil and nothing whatsoever in your hands. It's bunk, if it doesn't work double-blindedly, sorry, and you should know that as a self-proclaimed actual scientist.

still think there's something to be said about the physicalist philosophy behind current sciences not accounting for phenomenal consciousness stuff like qualia but I'm tired of typing for now, haha.

Once you'll get back to that - if you will - I'll provide you with some links.

Edit: Sorry @Verre - the article you linked up to doesn't strike me as convincing evidence for dream-telepathy, even without seeing the details of the study. Showing people a picture of a person with multiple problems and then asking them to dream of these problems and coming up with an unusually high seeming frequency of correct hits could mean multiple things. Maybe that the unconscious mind is very good at picking up visual clues for say her arthritis, which the conscious mind wouldn't come up with for one thing. If you wish - we can try and roll this case up more properly, upon reading this secondary report on the actual study - I don't feel overly motivated to do so.
But I don't want to come across as evasive - so let me know, if you are unsatisfied with my superficial dismissal - we could of course dig deeper into it!

Originally Posted by DeviantThinker

I've recently heard of the concept of persistant realms where you can enter dream worlds that have completely consistant laws that you can't break, events occur idependantly of your conscious attention and you can re-enter these worlds right from where you left off last time you slept. While persistant simulated worlds are far more plausible than visiting literal worlds in your dreams, I find myself a tad skeptical if this is really possible. Has anyone here experienced persistant realsm and if so, what are the steps to enter one. I may try once I am reasonably persistant at lucid dreaming and stablization.

Very good question - there are people claiming this, but none of them active on the forum at the moment as far as I know. I believe it is possible to convince yourself of that it is so, and thus acting out your dream-control in ways that keep up the illusion, but it does feel a bit fishy to me as well.
I feel similarly about the whole tulpa concept, even while I have been getting into conversations on it under the assumption, that it could be real - I'm still harbouring significant doubts if such a degree of engineering your own mind is actually possible.

StepL, that was frankly a beautifully comprehensive response.
I have nothing more to add to it except that while naturalistic science ideed cannot address problems of qualia satisfactorily, neither can any philosophy that I have seen or heard of. Most attempts to do so just replace "brain" with other labels like "Soul", "God" or the most preposterous one that I have heard given undeserved attention is that the brain is in fact merely a reciever that is streaming our consciousness from elsewhere.

No, I think you misunderstand me on several counts. But I'll get to that after I explain my concept of SP, since you directly requested it.

I believe that sleep paralysis is a condition that evolved because preventing the physical acting out of dreams was favorable for the survival of the dreaming organism. This cannot have anything specifically to do with falling out of trees, because REM is found in some other non-human animals. Why exactly SP is a favorable, I am uncertain. It could prevent waking during dreams due to collisions with objects. It could conserve energy. It could be something else. Regardless, I am not very interested in THAT part of the evolution of dreaming... I am much more interested in what happened before SP. Did dreaming and SP evolve simultaneously? They seem like very different processes, so unless someone proposes me a common cause, I find that unlikely. So was there a time when dreaming animals simply sleepwalked? If so, they would not have the evolutionary advantage of SP - so what made dreaming such a valuable trait in a population that the sleepwalking animals weren't squeezed out via natural selection? Those are my actual points of interest

So, I am not some irrationalist arguing against scientific concepts willy-nilly. I never argued for SP having functions unrelated to evolution. Most of what I have written in this thread has been a critique of what I consider to be an unscientific argument for rationality. I was particularly concerned with making this critique since it is directed against a field of science that gets, in my opinion, more than its fair share of unscientific criticism, simply due to a combination of prejudice from disbelief and the fact that it is more difficult to establish evidence for phenomena with as-yet unknown mechanisms.

In particular regarding my critique of IronicAtheist's SP idea, I singled it out because it was so easily determined to be an invalid argument. It is not that I didn't understand the general point. It is that I oppose a culture where on one hand, rationality must be used to support evidence, but on the other it is seemingly unnecessary when arguing against unpopular evidence, because few people will call out irrational dismissals. I call out such dismissals and expect evidence that the argument is not, itself, irrational. I like to hold people accountable for their knowledge of what they argue against. Completely aside from the question of validity of more developed concepts of the topics we are debating, those concepts (such as from certain Yogic and Hermetic traditions as well as parapsychology) must actually be understood in order to make a convincing argument that they are invalid.

Not understanding these concepts thoroughly before judging them invalid is a serious issue. With the exception of parapsychology, these concepts emerged way before modern science had anything to say about them, so as a result they cannot realistically be expected to be in scientific terminology. Heck, their sources are often in defunct languages, translated to English so long ago that the English is easily misinterpreted, and then never updated. Then the New Age movement came along and, with terrible control of information, obfuscated these concepts severely. But it is a fallacy to judge the existence of a phenomena based upon an invalid or nonexistent explanation of its mechanisms. For example, it is reasonable to posit that the healing sleep trances induced at temples to Asclepius were hypnotic in nature, and as you noted, hypnosis is quite verifiable nowadays, even though it was sharply ridiculed in very recent decades. It was rather unreasonable to assume, as historically occurs, that such things were the result of ignorant people deluding themselves or exaggerating.

And to all my knowledge, and considering, that the endeavour didn't start yesterday, there is no such thing as convincing evidence to the effect, that this phenomenon actually exists, consciously or unconsciously, awake or asleep - anywhere.

You are the one - it looks so at least - to make an extraordinary claim.

As I'm sure you expect by now, I disagree. You are the one who is propagating the notion that no valid evidence exists "anywhere." I am arguing that the standard of validity being applied to parapsychology has historically been tainted by prejudice stemming from uninformed disbelief. Honestly, if I did not see so many arguments along the lines of "your results can't be real because your proposed mechanisms aren't real," often followed by a refusal to actually experimentally falsify said mechanisms due to it being a waste of time or career suicide, I would be more inclined to accept the scientific consensus. I understand that untestable mechanisms make for no hypotheses and therefore a scientific dead-end, but they do NOT falsify results.

On this note, I'm glad you brought up hypnosis and EEG. I have both worked informally with hypnosis, and been trained to conduct EEG / ERP experiments, as it happens. And I have read enough brain research regarding hypnosis to know that while its reality has a neurological basis, and even some of its processes can be inferred from EEG data, we still have an extremely poor understanding of why any of it should be happening in the first place. Saying that hypnotic phenomena results from inducing increased activity in self-monitoring brain areas which allow the reconfiguration of activity elsewhere in specific ways is no more and no less informative of cause than saying that telepathy results from induced activity in perceptual brain areas (which would be expected) which allow for the perception of specific stimuli.

From what I have seen of telepathy studies, I think that it will follow hypnosis eventually into the realm of accepted science that we still don't have great causal mechanisms for. And on that note, read the article about dream telepathy, I insist. Your superficial dismissal does not strike me as valid, because the problems coded for in dreams and found to have increased significantly compared to controls were some that could not plausibly have been reflected in a photograph of the target. For example, data suggests that the dreamers may have received information regarding the target's mother dying of lung cancer, and specifics regarding the death of her husband. I'll leave the rest to you.

http://www.explorejournal.com/articl...213-3/fulltext

Now, to my discussion of shared dreaming, OBE dream worlds within a telepathic model. First, I want you to understand that I was only posting any of that to demonstrate to the OP that, according to what they found plausible, the other things they were disputing could be given plausibility. You seem to have taken things I said as if I believed them to be true and not simply plausible. My use of terminology like the "wireless-somethings going on" you referred to were in imitation of the OP. I literally just made up everything for the sake of argument based on what I knew of telepathy, as long as I was reasonably sure that I could defend its plausibility.

So, let me attempt to address your concerns. When I use the words "'skeptically' conditioned," I firstly put scare quotes around "skeptically" to denote that I was referring to shoddy skepticism - in this context, the unwarranted belief that dreams are completely self-contained (get back to me on that once you've read Carlyle's paper). I am sure there are plenty of fine skeptics here. I would beg to differ with your idea of the supernatural however - mainly, that most parapsychological researchers are claiming supernatural occurrences in the first place. Unknown mechanisms do not entail supernatural mechanisms any more than poking out a bat's eyes and concluding that it can navigate well sightlessly entails something supernatural. Now, while dream telepathy success over hundreds of miles might entail ESP, it does not imply that ESP is supernatural. I really don't get your argument.

I have already addressed your call about more well-developed systems. Perhaps I should have strictly said "more developed," though. Sorry. In any case, it should be clear that I would point to all of them, because I believe that we have assumed many traditions to be valueless which we should not have, just because they seem exotic and are not tailored to our understanding. As far as giving you an example that doesn't "fall on its face," what exactly have you decided are main reasons that esoteric interpretations of dreams fail? It would be useful for me to provide you a good example if I knew more about what you do and do not consider plausible, like I knew for the OP. I would ask that you consider whether or not you have taken the time to conclusively understand the systems that you have so far rejected, however, since misconceptions have run rampant since the New Age movement gained popularity.

I'm not saying, it is inconceivable that there is a phenomenon of bad/good receiving - what I say is that your way of putting it sets my confirmation-bias alarms off.

Are you just ignoring what I said in, literally, the first half of the sentence you quoted in bold? "We would need to assume that completely different accounts showed no evidence of a shared dream?" If you truly understand my point about the plausibility of a false negative judgment due to unskilled telepathy in one participant but not the other, and how this might result in under-reporting and decreased verifiability of shared dreaming, then I am confused.

As far as how you would connect to somebody, research I've read about perceiving or manipulating anything almost always suggests that intention is enough to elicit the phenomena, and other independent factors modulate success. That is certainly true of the dream study you didn't read, for starters, which is a decent source for this topic as it involved intentionally connecting to another through dreams.

When you begin talking about evil masters of the craft of dream invasion, it is you who begin making assumptions! This line of thinking is related to your discussion of how people can do "anything they want" in lucid dreams. How scientific of you. Would you please provide me an example of someone that can do "anything" they want in lucid dreams? Obviously you did not mean this literally, since you apparently do not believe that people can gain information about or interact with others in lucid dreams. You believe that dreams are constrained to both experience and control by a single individual. I agree that, if a dream is private, your "anything" statement would be true - although I would argue that these people have become skilled in dream control, and that I could propose that any action that violates techniques for good dream control could be considered "impossible." However, I think it is logical that if two people were sharing a dream telepathically, any action that one dreamer tried to take might be inhibited by the efforts of the other dreamer to maintain dream stability. Therefore shared dreams would operate more according to the consensus of its participants. This could be weighted towards a more skilled lucid dreamer on one hand, and on another hand, sharing a dream with an unskilled dreamer might double up the difficulty of dream control!

So, back to your evil dream master. Do I think that it is, in principle, possible? Yeah, sure. But they would need a very rare level of control, might need to be even more skilled to overcome interference from their victims, ah... what about my equally valid proposition of the virtuous dream master? People are pretty good (if not perfect) at keeping each other in line in real life. What makes you think the dream world would be different? There are new agers that spend a lot of time trying to project or journey or whatever they think they are doing, in order to help people. I have been members of communities where people specifically talk of trying to stop things like astral rape and psychological manipulation of people through their dreams.

Then, and more unfortunately, you are hard pressed to provide evidence that some of the awful dreams that some people experience are not, in fact, the kind of assault you are describing - even if I think it would be rare due to everything I've said above.

Regarding your implication that I claimed that the substance of the dream world was something entirely “other,” as I’d imagine you’d call “supernatural,” I simply did not. I described a model according to what the OP seemed to find plausible, based on telepathy, and in fact I assumed that brains were the origins of telepathy, just because the OP referred to wireless brain communication. Since I explained that the experiential content of d that telepathic communication was more important than firings of neurons which we do not individually perceive, I considered it acceptable to say that thought was the substance of this dream world. How, exactly, is this different from talking about websites instead of bits? It is useless to talk about dreams on the level of perceived experience in terms of the firings of neurons, after all.
Finally, I have already said that I fully realize the value of double-blinded studies. And, in fact, I did not ask you to accept single-blind studies. I actually was trying to convey something entirely different, which you seem to have glossed over. Psi research has claimed to show evidence that intention can facilitate interesting things like telepathy or the manipulation of probabilities, and has claimed that belief is a modulating factor of success (another thing which the dream article you didn't read corroborates, since the most accurate dreamers felt more confident they could perform the task, without knowing their performance). Psi researchers also commonly claim that it is possible to produce significantly negative results, possibly due to strong doubts or disbelief.

If this is true, then it applies very strongly to the business of determining whether or not psi exists. It becomes extremely difficult to prevent the researcher from interfering with data, seeing as you can't very well conduct research if you don't know what you are researching. So this effect would predict false positives for research where the involved people believe in psi, and false negatives for the involved parties that disbelieve, with the occasional significantly negative result.

The problem here, as I'm sure you are very prepared to reply to me, is that it is hard to falsify. I agree with you, that is a serious research problem. I would also agree that it makes an excellent, EXCELLENT excuse for bad psi results in the majority psi community, and an excellent cover for would be frauds, trying to fabricate positive evidence.

But that doesn't mean that the claim doesn't need to be disproved, and like I said falsification is difficult by the nature of the claim. I don't have a solution for you, unfortunately. It is easy to expose a similar effect in hypnosis, which I do not believe is psi; I have suggested that resistant people have attracting magnets on their hands, had them close their eyes, and seen their hands move farther apart. When they open their eyes and see this, the job is done. If you can think of a similar test that might apply to being conscious alone, please let me know. Until then, I will play the devil's advocate for psi in the hopes of producing more curious scientists, funnily enough, to even the psychic odds of our culture. Just in case.

I am unfortunately out of time for the night, but look forward to your response!

@ Anok - apology accepted, thank you! I was joking, but I really was beginning to feel pretty left out!

@ Steph - thank you as well!! It's good to feel validated!! And let me reiterate - I do not believe in telepathy, I just like to play with the idea - as a thought experiment.