Here is an unfortunate truth: We are trapped by assumptions that unravel as soon as we think about them: Here are three important wrong assumptions. But when you stop work for a moment, look out the window and let your mind wander, you are still thinking. Your mind is still at work.
DREAM-LOGIC, THE INTERNET AND ARTIFICIAL THOUGHT
This sort of free-association is an important part of human thought. No computer will be able to think like a man unless it can free-associate. Many people believe that reality is one thing and your thoughts are something else. Reality is on the outside; the mental landscape created by your thoughts is inside your head, within your mind. Assuming that you're sane. Yet we each hallucinate every day, when we fall asleep and dream. And when you hallucinate, your own mind redefines reality for you; "real" reality, outside reality, disappears.
No computer will be able to think like a man unless it can hallucinate. Many people believe that the thinker and the thought are separate. For many people, "thinking" means in effect viewing a stream of thoughts as if it were a PowerPoint presentation: This idea is important to artificial intelligence and the computationalist view of the mind. If the thinker and his thought-stream are separate, we can replace the human thinker by a computer thinker without stopping the show. The man tiptoes out of the theater.
The computer slips into the empty seat. The PowerPoint presentation continues. They are blended together. The thinker inhabits his thoughts. No computer will be able to think like a man unless it, too, can inhabit its thoughts; can disappear into its own mind. What does this mean for the internet: Will an individual computer ever think? We need to see, first, that in approaching the topic of human thought, we usually stop half-way through.
In fact, the human mind moves back and forth along a spectrum defined by ordinary logic at one end and "dream logic" at the other. But most philosophers and cognitive scientists see only day logic and ignore dream logic — which is like imagining the earth with a north pole but no south pole. Imagine a simple, common-sense view of thought. Philosophers often disparage such ideas as "folk psychology.
But the first goal of science is to explain or explain away common sense. We begin with "focus" or "attention" or "alertness. We are alert when we are rested and wide-awake. As we grow tired, our focus or alertness declines. From this simple observation grows an entire intuitive, even self-evident view of thought—which is nonetheless different from any mainstream view. We think differently when we are alert on the one hand, and not alert or sleepy on the other. To solve analytical or mathematical problems, to think acutely or logically, we must be alert. On the other hand, low-alertness plays its own important role: As you come near to falling asleep, you will find thoughts flowing through your mind without conscious guidance.
In this state of free-association, each new thought resembles or overlaps or somehow connects-to the previous thought. As our alertness continues to fall — as we continue to grow more tired — we lose contact with external reality. Eventually we sleep and dream.
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It follows that your level of "focus" or "alertness" is basic to human thought. We can imagine focus as a physiological value, like heart rate or temperature. Each person's focus moves during the day between maximum and minimum. Your focus is maximum when you are wide-awake. It sinks lower as you become tired, and reaches a minimum when you are asleep. In fact it oscillates up and down several times over a day.
Now, why does reality-loss happen as you fall asleep and dream? How does it work? Your mind stores memories; some are remembered scenes or experiences. Each remembered experience is, potentially, an alternate reality. Remembering such experiences in the ordinary sense — remembering "the beach last summer" — means, in effect, to inspect the memory from outside. But there is another kind of remembering too: We store potential reality in our minds by creating a memory.
Just as thinking works differently at the top and bottom of the cognitive spectrum, remembering works differently too. At the high-focus end, remembering means ordinary remembering; "recalling" the beach. At the low-focus end, remembering means re-experiencing the beach. We can re-experience a memory on purpose, in a limited way: But when focus is low, you have no choice.
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The memories we re-enter are sometimes distorted, or incomplete, or have other memories added to them; "dream-logic" governs the process by which memories are re-experienced in dreams. Dream-logic connects memories together, sometimes one on top of another, using the powerful glue of shared emotional content. As focus falls, memories grow sticky.
When your focus is high, you control you thoughts. You observe and consider logically; you confront problems and solve them rationally. As your focus-level falls, you begin to lose control of your thinking. Your mind wanders; one thought leads to another. When you look out a window and let your mind drift, your thoughts take their own course — but you can still resume control and get back to work when you choose. As focus-level falls still lower, your thought-stream moves completely beyond conscious control.
And when you fall asleep, your dreams seem to happen without conscious guidance. You experience dreams in nearly the same way you experience external reality. Losing control of your thought stream equals losing reality. Partway down the spectrum, as you look out that window and your thoughts wander, you have not yet lost reality; you are still aware of your environment.
As your focus drifts still lower and you approach sleep, loss of thought-control and loss of reality progress. When you sleep and dream, your thoughts are beyond ordinary conscious control — dreams make themselves; and reality is gone. He was a master of low-focus thought; he watched his own mind carefully as he descended the long, stout rope of the cognitive spectrum into mental regions where external reality fades and imaginary reality brightens; where thoughts flow freely and strange new analogies emerge.
Rilke himself uses the image of mental descent: Poets and madmen haunt this mental neighborhood. Do I wake or sleep? Some prophets and poets experience this twilight consciousness as a region of visions. A friend of William Blake wrote, "Of the faculty of Vision he spoke as One he had had from early infancy — He thinks all men partake of it — but it is lost by not being cultivated.
But some people are more alive to this experience than others. Eliot comments on the medieval sensibility of Dante: It is visual in the sense that he lived in an age in which men still saw visions. It was a psychological habit, the trick of which we have forgotten. The daily oscillation of human thought is like an ocean tide. Let's pursue this analogy: As you lose control over your thinking, you can no longer consciously avoid bizarre or unpleasant thoughts although, as Freud points out, you might still unconsciously avoid them.
Creativity has always been fascinating. Cognitive psychologists generally agree that creativity happens when a new analogy is invented. When your mind connects two things that aren't usually connected — an infant bird's first flight and a crack in a tea cup, to use a Rilke example — you have a new analogy, and a basis for seeing the world in a new light. Rilke draws a sort of conclusion from his new analogy: Of all great lyric poets, perhaps only Keats had a more fertile mind for imagery.
Most new analogies lead nowhere, but occasionally they reveal something important. Creativity doesn't operate when your focus is high; only when your thoughts have started to drift is creativity possible. We find creative solutions to a problem when it lingers at the back of our minds, not when it monopolizes attention by standing at the front. Sleep and creativity happen only when your thoughts drift beyond your control. Which leads to a final observation. How do we invent new analogies? This is a major unsolved problem of cognitive science. Often, remembered and re-experienced emotions are the key to novel, unexpected analogies.
If the subtle emotion you happen to feel on the first warm, bright day of spring an emotion that has no name is similar to the emotion you felt the first time you took a girl to the movies, this particular emotion might connect the two events; and next year's first warm spring day might cause you to remember the girl and the movie. We tend to think of emotions in a few primary colors: But our real emotional states are almost always far more subtle and complex. How do you feel when you've hit a tennis ball hard and well, or driven a nail into a plank with two perfect hammer blows?
When you first re-enter, as an adult, the school you attended as a child? I also wonder how it fits in with the alternate universe. Club 's Zack Handlen graded the episode with a B-.
But as usual, there was another narrative layer at work here" involving a grieving Olivia. But besides that great little scene at the end, I thought this was an average episode. Granted, Fringe ' s 'average' episodes are still better than a lot of the other stuff on TV. MTV writer Josh Wigler thought the episode "nearly put [him] to sleep," as it was "bland" and "a bit of a dud". I'm still loving this season, but tonight's episode was one of the weaker outings.
Astrid and Walter have a great rapport, especially when there's a rube in the room for them to play with.
After the episode's broadcast, Popular Mechanics published an article analyzing the science depicted. They concluded that the Brain—computer interface BCI chips, like the ones used in the episode to tie the victims' brains to the computer used by Dr. Laxmeesh Nayak, have also been used on real-life human subjects, though not in relation to controlling sleep cycles. However, the article continued that it is "not currently possible" for BCI chips to "facilitate direct transfer of understandable information from one person's brain to another", nor is it possible for the chips to "directly read another person's thoughts or dreams" and steal them.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For the album by Eivind Aarset, see Dream Logic album. In the opening scene, a man hallucinates his boss as a deformed monster, leading to the boss' murder. Not that this was a particularly bad episode, just a bland one.
Dream Logic on Spotify
I'm most intrigued by Fringe when the overarching plot is at play, like last week's tremendously awesome episode. This week, I guess I was fine with it — thanks largely due to the cool effects seen in the accidental killers' waking-dreams — but I'm not satisfied with 'fine,' certainly not when it comes to Fringe. List of awards and nominations received by Fringe. Archived from the original on Fringe - Dream Logic let's look at that Challenger poster ". TV by the Numbers. Olivia solves an anagram, Peter recites a mantra, and Walter feeds his head". Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
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New Book Explores David Lynch's 'Dream Logic'
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