A friend and I were discussing this. I don't see how the dream sensation could be accurate with something completely new, he thinks it could...thoughts?
A friend and I were discussing this. I don't see how the dream sensation could be accurate with something completely new, he thinks it could...thoughts?
Sensations in a lucid dream are based on past experiences, expectations, and come from similar sensations you might have had. I had a friend of mine ask me what dream sex was like, he was still a virgin so I told him I had no idea. He had a LD not to long after, in which he had sex with some girl he liked. He told me it felt amazing, even though he's never had sex in waking life, so how would the mind create such a similar feeling? It's amazing to me what the mind can do.
-G'day :)
I wonder if when he has sex it will be anything like
As oppossed to popular belief, the sensation can be accurate if you have a good understanding of how it will feel, of course it depends on what you are trying to mimic.
I'm sorry Walms, but thats total crap. And even if you do now what the sensation is like, its not likely you'll replicate it to precision in the dream.Quote:
Originally Posted by Walms
Well, I think it's because the preconception is that sex is amazing, and it's probable that this friend has previously masturbated, right? Tbh, it's probably better in a virgin's mind than in a non-virgin's.Quote:
Originally Posted by rynkrt3
In answer to this question, it is partly true and not.
This is because we partly experience things and partly don't. If you had never tried icecream before, but I showed you a picture of it. Have you experienced it? Partly, yes, through visual perception. We would usually argue that we haven't experienced it. This is important.
Many experiences are composed of previous other experiences. Consider the icecream example that you've merely looked at. It's Christmas time, and you're throwing snowballs around, but for some reason you've yet to try icecream. Conceptually, someone tells you that icecream can feel like snow, and it is just as cold. That covers two of the basic touch senses, coldness and texture.
You are then teased by your 'friends' who have masses of icecream. They say you can smell it, but you can't touch it nor taste it. You smell vanilla. At this point, despite experiencing icecream in many senses, if you were to tell someone you have yet to taste icecream, they will say that you haven't tried it. It is because the usual sense to experience icecream is taste.
Annoyed that you've not 'properly' tried it, you induce a W.I.L.D that night and try it for yourself. You will accurately see its shape and colour, feel its coldness and texture in your mouth, and have whiffs of vanilla as it enters. Taste and smell are intricately linked, and its taste should be easy to create.
So I would argue that you can experience something in an LD you haven't in real life, so long as you've conceptually experienced it, experienced something similar, and experienced it through the non-dominant senses for that item. A conceptual and visual experience is necessary otherwise you couldn't even fathom the item in front of you.
Ugh, long. >_>
Personally no, I don't see how it could be accurate if you haven't ever experienced it. Then again I haven't had any lucids yet, so I am not a professioner nor an expert, so... :P
But I don't think so.
I've been stabbed in dreams that was accompanied by a sharp pain; it was extremely realistic. Although I haven't experienced the real thing (and hope not to), I believe it felt like it should have. All in all, the sensations in my dreams are pretty accurate.
You have experienced a stabbing through visual perception, and you've experienced pain. Furthermore, you understand conceptually, at least in part, what it would be like to be stabbed in regards to body contortion and emotional outcry. It would only require an amplification of focused pain and a mimicking of this body language to believe it is an accurate depiction.
So, the real question is, what does it mean to experience something? Nearly everything we say we haven't experienced, we have, at least mono-sensory speaking.Quote:
Originally Posted by Puffin
It is seemingly impossible to assert that you haven't experienced --INSERT TERM--, unless that thing between the '-- --' is still just a word to you with no sensory or conceptual connotations whatsoever.
Ah, you said likely... and I said it depends on the difficulty of what you are trying, for example sex would be really difficult, while, lets say you are a surfer and want to surf something a bit bigger than in reality, would be way more accurate, obviously it won't be perfect, but it can be done to a certain extent.Quote:
Originally Posted by Loaf
Other than that, what quark said, very well put too.
It also depends on if you've felt it on a smaller scale before, therefore it might be more accurate. Eg. choking on a glass of water wouldn't be too different from drowning in a lake.Quote:
Originally Posted by Walms
That makes sense. :DQuote:
Originally Posted by Puffin
Yeah, I drowned in an LD and it just felt like before I could swim as a child, being under the pool water but without a parent to pull me out. I also know the mechanics of drowning too, which will have helped :) I've had my head blown off by a gunman in an LD, and I was really worried about the pain in the few seconds before it happened, but I actually just disconnected from my body.
We can philosophize over whether or not you can "accurately" feel a pain in comparison with reality while dreaming when you haven't experience it in reality before. You might think you've felt the pain realistically, but if you've never felt it you can't make that call.
Accurate, by one of many definitions, means to be "correct in all details; exact". Very little in dreams is exactly like in reality. It can be closely simulated, but its not accurate. So lets just move away from that description altogether.
Dreaming, while we all do it, has a huge individual spin. I can confirm that I can not replicate realistic pain in dreams (at least not in my 9 years of memorable dremaing) so as far as I'm concerned it doesn't occur. And even if it did, its irrelevant to me.
ive had this same argument on other forums. i can fly in lucid dreams and it feels incredible, though ive never actually flown in real life. i believe the dream world is another plane of existence, quite like the waking life where you can experience new things youve never done before, therefore i believe i have in fact experienced flying.
i find that most of the people that argue against this have never actually had a lucid dream.
I had several sex dreams when I was a virgin, and it was amazing how similar it actually felt. I think Quark is right. I mean, I haven't flown for real, but I have experienced being shot up in the air at an amusementpark attraction, and felt zero-gravity. That's how I feel when I fly in my lucids.
Perhaps an experience in the waking world can enhance the experience in a dream. And even help sometimes. Or perhaps it's even better to let the brain cook something up, and let the expectations be sky high. Like tasting this incredible candy. When you imagine tasting it in a dream, it's so delicious. Only to find out when you taste it IRL that it's not very good. Ruining the whole future experience.
Dreams are still awesome!
As crazy as it sounds, even if you've never seen a certain someone NAKED your mind makes up its own image of what she/he looks like naked and it appears to be completely accurate by nature. So this only makes me wonder if we already know all these things even if we haven't seen/done them before so our dreams can seem incredibly realistic no matter what we've experienced. I've never flew up in the air in "real life" but it feels pretty damn accurate in my dreams. -Chase
I believe that when sensations reach us in waking life, they reach us through the electric signals, which can then be seen as set of vibrations. So to put sensations in the same category as vibrations, then all the mind has to do is mimic the vibration/electric signal to create the accurate sensation. That makes sense as to why the mind can create realistic sensations even if they have not been experienced before because it is merely electric signal that is being mimicked.
... what.Quote:
Originally Posted by elucid
That's gibberish, mate. Vibrations have nothing to do with the way your nervous system delivers the information regarding pain. And even if we take out the vibration stuff, your mind, or rather your nervous system, wouldn't be able to mimic the messages needed to feel a certain type or amount of pain unless you've already felt that paint. Even if you had felt that pain then attempting to accurately remember or mimic it would most likely be pretty hard.Quote:
Originally Posted by elucid
PS
Having said that, if you could either be really lucky and get the sensation, or your interpretation of the sensation, right or you could be extremely empathetic and thus able to interpret it properly.
I suppose we'd need to have a lucid dream, cause ourselves a certain amount of pain or cause ourselves to experience a certain sensation, then replicate it in our waking life and see if the two feelings were the same.
Can you imagine what something feels like? I don't know about other people, but based on past experiences that seem similar, or what other people have said, I can almost vividly imagine a sensation.
A lucid dream is a lot like this, I think, in terms of things you haven't experienced.
Yes, the sensation in an LD may be innacurate, but if you can make an informed guess in your waking life, your dream self will be able to mimic what you think it would be like.
I'd posit that the sensation of flying/hovering would be similar, if not the same.
Loaf wrote:
lol....lol.Quote:
... what.
Let me rephrase that, it was misunderstood by you as well as "foul". This is not gibberish by the way, once it is cleared, you will understand.
Ok, the confusing part seems to be the vibrations, so I will just cast that aside and use instead the word electricity. In the world, we get sensations such as sight, sound, feeling, taste and hearing, but in the brain, those things are nothing but electric signals. So therefore, to mimic one of the senses, the actual sense does not have to enter us but merely the electric signal can be manipulated to create the sense. There have been experiments where sensations were created without the stimuli, which makes perfect sense if it is just electricity that is being produced.
This is based on our understanding of we perceive the world around us. Of course, I could be wrong though, just makes perfect sense is what I am saying.
Invader wrote:
I believe that when flying, the sensation that would stand out most would be your emotional response.Quote:
I'd posit that the sensation of flying/hovering would be similar, if not the same.
I get that sensation is communicated to the brain, from the receptors in your hand, via the nervous system as electrical pulses or messages. But being able to mimic those messages is what we're talking about here, not the delivery method.
So the question is how can you, or your brain, or even a computer hooked up to your brain, mimic those messages or electrical pulses if you haven't felt it?
In the case of a computer delivering those messages to your brain, the computer would have to have recorded the attributes of those messages prior to attempting to deliver them. That would be the same as a person having previously experienced the feeling which their brain is trying the mimic.
That's definitely a factor in the sensation of flying for me, but it's not as powerful as my "physical sensations":Quote:
Originally Posted by elucid
- Feeling of acceleration
- Feeling of the wind flowing past you
- Sometimes being tense if you're going really fast
Read up on "mirror neurons" my friends.
Just because you personally have not had the experience (ie done it yourself) does not mean you haven't experienced it. And this does not mean your brain can't accurately mimic it. The brain is actually VERY GOOD at filling in blanks & making predictions... that is its MAIN FUNCTION. If theories about mirror neurons are correct, while watching someone perform X action my brain is replicating the firing pattern required to actually perform that action. I have had the experience of everything I've ever watched in a movie or seen someone do firsthand. I'm confident my brain can fill in all of the other blanks rather well.
Test time. :)Quote:
Originally Posted by aelephant
Do you believe your brain could accurately mimic the physical feelings and emotional effects of giving birth to a child?
I've not bothered to check again, so I may be wrong; however, are mirror neurons not concerned solely with replicating the action alone, and not the sensation or emotional response?Quote:
Originally Posted by aelephant
Foul wrote:
Quote:
But being able to mimic those messages is what we're talking about here, not the delivery method.
So the question is how can you, or your brain, or even a computer hooked up to your brain, mimic those messages or electrical pulses if you haven't felt it?
To further clarify this, the brain knows the electric pulse for liquid, gas, solid materials. It also knows the electric pulse for wet objects, dry objects, smooth objects, scratchy objects, soft objects, moving objects, standing objects, tall objects, short objects, etc. So since the brain already has these objects pulses in its database and experiences are made up of these things, I fail to understand how the brain can not mimic new experiences, of course there could be room for a few mistakes.
Foul wrote:
Simple actually. Experiences and what not can be transferred from one human to another. For example from a mother to a child. So since the mother has experienced, it could easily be replicated in the child since we have transfer of "material" of the father and mother to the child. Of course, it is not certain that the experience of giving birth is actually transferred to the child, it is very plausible.Quote:
Do you believe your brain could accurately mimic the physical feelings and emotional effects of giving birth to a child?
That is one way it could be replicated. Another way is this. We have the material, the person giving birth, then we have the child. The child has a "soft" skin, it has a certain "size" and may also be "wet". So far you can not disagree that the brain can mimic something soft, with certain size, and wetness. Once you have the "child", Insert the "child" into the person giving birth.
Now it is time to give birth. I would imagine the emotions of this person to be in panic, fear, and excitement, I might be off a little, but I am not trying to go for 100% accuracy here. Then simply have the child come out of the "vagina".
The physical feeling is pain. It could also be a euphoric feeling due to the brain responding to the pain with chemicals such as dopamine or a pain killer.
Simple right? What part of this do you think the brain can not do. If you also notice, I am a programmer, when you get into that kind of stuff, this will make much more sense to you and you will see the sense in it and plausibality of it.
Well you've come in to contact with dry, wet, smooth, scratchy, etc, of course you're going to have information on those feelings stored in your brain. So when you have a dream about a smooth stone or a dry scratchy towel, you draw on that information. On the other hand, that which you haven't experienced hasn't had information about it stored. You'd need to mimic the feeling and who knows if your brain is accurately portraying these unknown feelings until you actually go and experience them, first hand, at a later date?
It would be like saying a new born baby's brain can mimic sensation's it's never come into contact with. That's a little hard for me to accept. But then some people would argue it's possible because of genetic memory (which I don't think has been proven to exist).
Yeah, qualitatively speaking the brain should be able to mimic those things (e.g. a type of sensation such as pain); however, it's the quantitative aspect of a sensation (e.g. the intensity) that is difficult to predict accurately.Quote:
Originally Posted by elucid
I'm not sure I'd even go that far, Wolfwood.
I mean, if you've felt scratchy and smooth and all number of basic feelings then you can use the stored information to simulate a situation that involves those feelings. But — and I think this is what the OP was about — if you've not felt smooth then how do you simulate smooth? If you've not felt scratchy how do you simulate scratchy? The required information isn't there for these extremely basic feelings and so I wouldn't think it possible..
Ah, yes, that's what I meant. If you've experienced it. I just read the other page, and you basically said the same.Quote:
Originally Posted by Foul
So, if you've been stabbed without breaking the surface of the skin, you could mimic the type of feeling, e.g. pain, but not the intensity of an actual stabbing where the skin is broken.
Foul wrote:
II definitely agree with you there, but understand it this way. If feeling is just a combination of electric pulse, then you do not need the feeling to find the electric pulse, you can just merely try different combination of electric pulses and give those "feelings" a name, such as happy, sad, etc. Now we are getting into how the brain can find a certain combination of electric pulse that is attributed to a certain feeling.Quote:
mean, if you've felt scratchy and smooth and all number of basic feelings then you can use the stored information to simulate a situation that involves those feelings. But — and I think this is what the OP was about — if you've not felt smooth then how do you simulate smooth? If you've not felt scratchy how do you simulate scratchy? The required information isn't there for these extremely basic feelings and so I wouldn't think it possible..
Basically, what needs to be understood here is that new feelings and experiences can be mimicked without actually having to experience them before. Even if those feelings or experiences were generated randomely by combination of electric pulses.
Wolfwood wrote:
I am of this opinion, that the brain can mimic every single detail of reality down to the last particle.Quote:
So, if you've been stabbed without breaking the surface of the skin, you could mimic the type of feeling, e.g. pain, but not the intensity of an actual stabbing where the skin is broken.
That being said, I dont understand how the brain can not mimic a broken skin, it shouldnt be hard. People have actually morphed into other creatures in their dreams, so just mimicking a flab of skin hanging out with with some red "color" for blood and a liquidy sensation should not be a big deal for brain.
In reality, people feel sensations at different intensities, it could be that you could get stabbed in reality but the brain wont let you feel it, having then understood that the brain can control the intensity of such feeling in reality, it shouldnt be too hard to understand that it can be done in dreams as well. You are right though about the accuracy, but then again, if we have a standard of intensity in reality, which we dont seem to have, then that standard could be used in dreams.Quote:
however, it's the quantitative aspect of a sensation (e.g. the intensity) that is difficult to predict accurately.
Yes, I agree in that respect. It can be conceptualised as an invariable algorithm that will generate a multitude of specific population responses - each person has the same algorithm, and so potentially can feel the same response; however, it would be a hit and miss game without a stored response.Quote:
Originally Posted by elucid
You're probably right. However I wouldn't pretend to know how you could achieve that. Stick your finger in the light socket and hope you find the electrical impulse for happyness? :PQuote:
Originally Posted by elucid
Or just try meditation, find the way to release dopamine, just sit back and enjoy.Quote:
Stick your finger in the light socket and hope you find the electrical impulse for happyness?