Thread: An Impossibility...

Originally Posted by bentrider08

Would your mind approximate it as much as possible?
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So far, I think that's about the only thing we can hope for. As of now (without taking in certain unproven, yet plausible, paradigms such as the idea of a "Holographic Universe") I don't see how we can experience something, in a dream, that we've never experienced, while awake. Sure, our brains can guesstimate how that event would go, and may even come close, based on prior knowledge, however superficial. I don't think we can actually mimic the experience, to a T, though.

Both are, theoretically, impossible. Our dreams and images in our head are created from our memories and things we know. That said, unless you can actually see in different wavelengths in reality, you won't be able to in a dream. The same goes for a blind man. With no knowledge of what something looks like, he can't dream it. A blind person can barely even begin to comprehend what the world looks like, what light is, colorr. Even shapes are limited.

However, the mind is a powerful tool. Thats why its only theoretically impossible, as some have claimed to have seen a new colour or such.

It would be an interesting experiment to teach a blind person how to LD. Most of the stuff I've read deals with seeing imagery and such so how would that be translated to someone who cannot see. Has anyone met a blind lucid dreamer? What would the dreams of someone who's blind be like anyway? I mean just because they can't see doesn't mean that they don't dream, everybody dreams.

In another thread here in the past week, I remember seeing somebody saying they had viewed the world in infrared.

I think it was the "what can you do besides..." thread.

Well, that's the question, were they seeing in infrared, or were they seeing as if they were looking through a thermal imaging goggles.

That's what's kind of making me scratch my head and call it for lack of a better term, an "impossibility" human beings have no concept of what heat or radio waves look like, we have to use devices to detect those invisible things for us and interpret them into something we can understand. At the same time though, perhaps getting a taste of seeing in another spectrum would be fascinating to say the least.

I see what you are saying, but would argue that everything we sense is nothing more than a translation anyway. We have this three-dimensional representation of the world in our heads... constructed by photons interacting with nerves in our eyes which produce electrical signals which our brains interpret. They only respond to certain wavelengths, sure - but the "reality" our brain constructs is nothing more than a representation of what's really out there.

Radio telescopes "see" in radio frequencies, and computers do the translating. We "see" infrared via special cameras, viewers, infrared-sensitive film, etc.

My point is that EVERYTHING we see is a translation anyway, so what makes "seeing" in infrared any less legit? The "seeing" in our brain is a construct anyway... and when we dream, the construct is used without the sensory input.

That's a cool concept there, with no senses what is reality really? We would have no way of knowing. really cool if you think about it.

I just mean, being able to see something like heat, as a snake or something sees it. Instead of having to use technology we would detect it naturally just as our eyes respond to visible light wavelengths. We can never know precisely what it looks like since we are incapable of "seeing" it with our own eyes. It's just something I've always wanted to experience, but did not have the money to buy goggles that would show me a false color image. Dreaming may be the only time I can see the world by the "light" of power lines.

Maybe my whole mistake was a search for some kind of unknown "authenticity". Being able to understand how a butterfly is attracted to white and purple flowers more than other colors due to their UV sensitive eyes. Or how a viper stalks mammals by the trace of it's heat. I don't know, maybe it's just a long time fantasy of mine. When I first found out about radio astronomy and that there were stars out there that gave off invisible light, I wanted to be able to see it, without having to buy all the equipment and understand all the electronics of a radio 'scope. The idea just grew on me though as I learned about all the things in the world that can see or feel things that are beyond the human range of detection.

You make a good point, there isn't really a solid ground for an argument of authentic sight in another wavelength because the wavelengths we see in now are translated by our natural computers already.

Things will be less or more transparent and appear to give off more or less light, but colors can remain exactly the same since they're assigned arbitrarly by your brain to detectable wavelenghts. Imagining that is nowhere near as hard (or impossible) as imagining a new color. Though any mix of colors can become a new pure light color if your mind decides to assign that color when you see some particular wavelength. Just like when you see purple light, it has its own wavelength, it's not necessarily seeing red and blue light at once.