Hi. In threads a while ago we discussed a 'dry spell', where some of us have had fewer lucid experiences. I think I now understand another reason for this for myself, which I think is interesting, and will try to explain.

For years, every night I would have a dream which was a parable or metaphor from which I could learn something. Those dreams very often included precognitive or telepathetic imagery. About 5 years ago, these dreams started becoming more and more abstract, until I couldn't really make sense of them any more, or even conceive of them in terms of dream images. It slowly slipped away, and I mostly stopped dreaming.

When I was having the dreams, it was clear that any 'interpretation' I would have of a dream would always leave something out, and would less than fully capture the full depth of the idea or experience behind the dream image. But thinking about interpretations seemed useful anyway, as a seed for subsequent experiences. Anyone who was in this forum back then may also recall that I believed that it would be worthwhile to develop new theories or ideas supernatural dream experiences, because the flaws and limitations of the old 'New Age' ideas prevent us from having more interesting experiences. I saw thoughts or ideas as being mental models around which we construct the experiences, and that all the available models were failing in significant regards. Intuition, as I experience it, springs from the ideas I have about things. If the ideas are better, than better intuitions are possible.

Recently I've been paying more attention to the use of neural networks. These have been used for image processing modeling for physics and other problems for a long time, but have been increasingly successful in the past couple of years. A neural network is also a kind of model, but it doesn't arrive at its results through 'reasons' or 'principles', but instead on something more like an abstract mental pattern or habit. One of the main purposes of sleep and dreaming of course is for the training of this kind of model. We subconsciously review our experiences from the previous day, and awake with stronger mental and physical reflexes in those areas. So a point worth noting is that the dream teaches you whether you consciously remember or think about it or not, even though you may learn more if you remember and think about it.

I think that in my case, a lot of what has happened is the conscious, metaphorical interpretation of my dream experiences has become less useful, so I'm not working with it that way much any more. But this doesn't necessarily mean that the essential process has stopped.

A central idea in the teaching of Laotse, as I understand it, is that if we fill our minds with rules and principles, we lose track of our innate sense of how to live. A criticism I've had of that philosophy is it seems to me that our instinctive 'natural way' contains a strong streak of brutality, and by itself isn't adequate as a guide for life. But I think about this natural way as being the type of thinking that is exemplified by the neural network, then it makes more sense to me. Its still not quite adequate, but it does have advantages over the more rule-of-thumb based thinking we do consciously.

I don't know how to communicate how 'intelligent' the computer based neural networks can be. As an example, alphago zero, a program that trained itself to play go without input from any human games, is much, much stronger than the best human players. And the creativity it shows compared to the best human players is remarkable. I'm not suggesting that its conscious or anything, but its an inspiration, and go players find its play to be beautiful. Like I said the program does this without having explanations or justifications of its play in the human sense. That kind of thinking without thoughts is what I'm trying to get at here. We already do something like this ourselves, but alphago zero and other programs are a good illustration of how effective it can be.


As a minor side curiosity, I recently learned that we all have a second nervous system separate from the brain and spinal column which has about 500,000 neurons:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enteric_nervous_system

That's only a bug level of complexity, but even a bug can do a lot:

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/602...a1a7a1c952.pdf

I think there's more intelligence in a 'gut feeling' than a lot of people realize, and its not just a projection from the brain.


I still don't have much of an idea how the precognition and telepathy works, but I guess I don't need it for now. I still have those kinds of experiences, even though not quite as obviously or frequently as before.