How does this follow? Are you saying anything self-generated or subjective is “real?”
Let’s just say that internal, self-generated experience cannot be used to conclude anything about external reality. Under the kind of logic you’re trying to use, a unicorn seen in a hallucination is a “real” unicorn.
Wow, that’s deep. No wonder you saw the OP as unassailable.
That has nothing to do with what you quoted from me, and it does not address the challenge of the OP, which is to prove that you have dreams.
No. Under the logic (actually, the analogic) I’m using, your hallucination is a real experience, just as your dream is. It is one thing to challenge whether the object you hallucinated was a unicorn; it is another thing to challenge whether you hallucinated.
You said that you can reject your dream as “representative of reality in any way”. Don’t blame me if you meant to use some other phrasing.
Right. My dream would be independent of reality. I once dreamt of a phantasm floating in the hallway that sucked the breath out of me. Upon waking, I rejected the idea that there was really a phantasm floating in the hallway or that anything supernatural would suck the breath out of me.
I’m not sure that there is anything particularly wrong about my phrasing, unless you want to get nitpicky about “representative.” I’m happy to let my point stand - just because I dream something does not mean that it is real. Meeting God remains entirely within the realm of fantasy.
That’s what doesn’t make sense about what you’re saying.
You’re going out of your way to concoct dreams about nonexistent things. That’s not necessary. If you dream about an apple tree, the apple tree shares the same reality value as a phantasm or unicorn. Many dreams seem very realistic, and can leave the dreamer sweating bullets or pissing in his bed. In other words, whether the thing in your dreams is real depends on and only on the fact that you’re dreaming. But the brain cuts off sensory input during dreaming (see previous cite), so whatever you’re dreaming about is from synthetic knowledge.
That’s why you’re so off-base with this line or argument. You’re arguing about the contents of the dream, when the question regards the dream itself (the analogy to God). The content of the dream is analogous to how you would describe God. There’s no point in describing an experience you don’t believe you’ve had.
And some people don’t dream. Or at least, don’t remember it.
I don’t think prophetic dreams necessarily violate the laws of physics. Most of the ones that “amazingly” come true involve people that the dreamer knows, don’t they?
Take my mom, for example. Shortly before my grandfather was diagnosed with cancer, she dreamed that she and my aunt got a phone call from my (deceased) grandmother who told her that grampy had cancer, and where in his body it was. This turned out to be true, down to the location of the cancer. But my grandmother died of cancer too, and my mom grew up while she battled it. So isn’t it probable that she subconsciously recognized the signs of illness before his diagnosis? And as for location, given his lifestyle, it’s one of the two most probable areas he would have developed tumors.
It seems pretty likely to me that people who have these dreams that predict the future are merely tapping into things they already know about on a subconscious level. The dream I had that “predicted” a close friend would later reveal himself to be bi was no great feat of fortune-telling, and most other similar dreams aren’t either. No physics are harmed in the making of most prescient dreams.
Nonsense. The content of the dream will never be real. The piss and sweat is real. The dreamer is real. The physiological process is real.
Oh, so the dream itself is God, regardless of the content? Presumably then, the hallucination is also itself God. I can’t see then how thinking would not also be God, or feeling pain and emotion. Subjective internal experience is God?
Seems you’re simply using a construct of God that is special to you. Nothing can be argued there. That’s why you’re so off base.
Besides, there’s plenty of point to describing an experience that you know was not real. People love to describe dreams they’ve had all the time. They like to report having seen something out of the corner of their eye that turns out to be just the chair with a jacket on it. In the mental health profession, it’s part of reality testing.
Analogically speaking, yes. That’s just how analogics work. It doesn’t matter what the content is. Since every person’s every life experience is subjective, it stands to reason that every person will have a different perspective on every event.
God ~> Dream
Describe God ~> Describe your dream
Did you really have an experience with God? ~> Did you really have a dream?
That’s the whole point of the OP’s challenge.
I’m back, having survived the typhoon.
I don’t have time to respond in the detail I’d like to, but wanted to quickly comment:
It’s interesting to me that everyone has acknowledged almost immediately that the experience of dreaming falls purely in the subjective. You can hook me up to whatever kind of brain-monitoring devices you like, and you can tell that something is going on, but you have to take my word for it that I dreamed about (say) riding on a steam locomotive through a tunnel with Mary Pickford by my side.
And that’s true for every single human being you encounter–on the fact that we do have dreams, everyone knows something that is divorced entirely from empirical observation. If nothing else, it makes me wonder whether empiricism is all that it’s cracked up to be.
If a scientist came out with an empirically based study that emphatically demonstrated that we do not in fact dream, and our nighttime experiences should be attributed to blah blah blah, it would seem just as much of a latter-day retrofitted rationalization as our current pooh-poohing of ghosts, spirits, premonitions, or visions–also things that (until recently) everyone just knew on the basis of subjective experience.
As for the argument that (for example) prescient dreams violate the laws of physics, well, the little I understand of complexity theory and quantum physics makes me wonder whether causality is all that it’s cracked up to be either.
And doesn’t it all come down to a circular argument? “Your subjective assertion violates my empirical world view, so it cannot be true; and the reason it cannot be true is that it violates my empirical world view.”
Just a few random thoughts on Wednesday night.–Koxinga
Why? Because one thing doesn’t conform to a standard, nothing can? Empiricism is very useful, but obviously isn’t useful in all situations. Why does this instance call into question all empricism?
Why? Science changes all the time, as new knowledge is acquired, and old ideas are rejected. If someone was able to prove that dreams were X, when we thought they were Y, then dreams would be X. If X is true to the best of our knowledge, then X is what we use. Why would this be some kind of ‘retrofitted rationalization’, especially if its been emphatically demonstrated empirically?
So what you’re saying is that a theory of which you understand very little allows you to throw out causality? That smacks of woo, big time. ‘Um, that violates physics’ ‘Its ok, its probably quantum’. Unless you can acutally put forth an assertion that quantum physics allows prescient dreams, then you’re just guessing, or maybe hoping.
No, it’s “Your subjective assertion violates the empirical world view as we know it, so it is very very probably not true. You have given absolutely no evidence whatsoever for this assertion, so we should treat it as if it wasn’t true.”
Not to nitpick, but your analogy fails within these three statements. If God and dream were really interchangable, then the third statement would be "Did you really have an experience with God? ~> Did you really have an experience with a dream?
The way I see it, there’s a difference between God and the experience of encountering and interacting with God. The experience is personal and subjective (and unreliable), God presumably isn’t. And I think the experience is what analogizes best with the dream.
So:
Experience with God ~> Dream
Describe your experience with God ~> Describe your dream
Did you really have an experience with God? ~> Did you really have a dream?
No problems, this time.
I specifically pointed this error out because the incorrect analogy lends support to an incorrect conclusion. If Dreams ~> God, then one could conclude that we believe in dreams, so we should similarly believe in God. However, that’s not correct. Experience with God ~> Dream, so it’s reasonable to conclude that the experience of God is real, like the dream, and the contents of the experience are perhaps dubious, like the contents of that dream-experience of having been back in math class in your underwear.
Verrry interesting . . . so you acknowledge that empiricism has limited applicability? If Wikipedia is correct, “In the philosophy of science, empiricism is a theory of knowledge which emphasizes those aspects of scientific knowledge that are closely related to experience, especially as formed through deliberate experimental arrangements. It is a fundamental requirement of scientific method that all hypotheses and theories must be tested against observations of the natural world, rather than resting solely on a priori reasoning, intuition, or revelation. Hence, science is considered to be methodologically empirical in nature.”
IOW, aren’t you effectively saying that science “is very useful, but obviously isn’t useful in all situations”? I wonder how other Dopers feel about that? 
Because we seem to have demonstrated that dreams are inherently subjective phenomena, and any such theory, no matter how emphatic, would be an attempt to shoehorn an empiricist worldview where it doesn’t apply.
Now if you can go back to my original premise and demonstrate that dreams are not exempt from empiricism, then you’d be cooking with charcoal.
This strikes me as rather cheap. I’ve taken a graduate level class in complexity theory, wherein the professor himself said he considered his own understanding of this stuff as just scratching the surface. But what I did glean is that effects cannot always be traced back to causes, possibly throwing causality itself into doubt.
And as for quantum theory, I’ve gotten the impression–mainly through the popular press-- that quantum physicists have conducted experiments that raise similar doubts. If there is a Doper who can shed more light on this, I would welcome their input, even–nay, especially–if they can knowledgably refute this impression.
But dear hotflungwok, I rather suspect that you are not the person who is capable of doing that.
But the assertion is that evidence cannot be produced, does not apply–yet does not refute the fact that the phenomenon (dreams) occur. That seems to me to be inherently incompatible with a world view that demands evidence as proof of reality.
I feel that science isn’t very useful when farting gratuitiously*, laying around doing nothing, or while asleep.
(*This is only because I don’t care overmuch about the quality of my farts. If I did, I would try and use empirical observation to determine how I could improve them.)
But our discussion centers around whether empiricism, and by extension science, is “useful” in determining reality–did you really fart and lay around? Were you really asleep? We could determine that pretty easily through observation and experimentation.
But did you dream while you were asleep? We have to take your subjective word for it.
Well, if you wish to check, I never said there was absolute proof that anybody dreamed. (I don’t count brain waves or REM sleep as evidence of dreams.) However if somebody claims to have had a dream, then I’m not going to tell them otherwise. There’s no reason to think they didn’t, after all.
Now, if they insist that their mother must be dead, just because they dreamed that she had died, I’m not going to buy it on that alone. That can be checked empirically, and in any case where somebody’s claims conflict with empirically observed reality, science wins in my book. I don’t buy that reality’s changed on some person’s say-so, regardles of whatever internal personal experience they had.
This is exactly what I do with religious people’s claims as well. The main difference is that religious claimants usually try and conflate the experience with its content, in order to pretend that it has more objective viability than the average dream. So, when I tell them I don’t buy that they actually chatted with the FSM or whoever, they think I’m denying that they had any experience at all. That’s not correct, but generally the fine distinction is too hard to explain to them, with their fixed mindsets on the matter.
The real problem with their claim, of course, is not that they claimed to have experienced something, but rather that they’re claiming something really unlikely is objectively true with nothing more than a flimsy anecdotal subjective experience to back it up. Unlikely claims need better proof than that.
Summation: The reason the Dreams = God analogy is crap is because there’s nothing empirically improbable about people having dreams. People actually chatting with an objectively-existing God, on the other hand, is a real stretch. That’t the issue here; one is merely unprovable, but not unlikely; the other is both unprovable and unbelievable.
Shrug, they’d probably say that science is very useful in dealing with the material world, but in purely subjective matters it isn’t very applicable. I like chocolate. Science can show the chemicals in chocolate stimulating my nerve endings, maybe even nerve clusters in my brain where good taste/bad taste information is kept, but ‘I like chocolate’ is purely subjective, and right now can’t be measured.
I say right now because for all we know, it might be possible to completely map the human nervous system, right down to taste preferences in the brain. So then we could map a person and determine empirically that they like chocolate.
Dreams are empirical right now, because we lack knowledge of the brain. We might someday be able to map the nerve impulses, and record them, interpret them, and play them back, empricially determining what the subject dreamt. Just because we can’t do it now doesn’t mean dreams will always be inherently subjective. If you can prove they are purely subjective, and will never be able to be empirically proven, well that would be interesting.
But when? How? Under what circumstances? Just because you can say ‘effects cannot always be traced back to causes’ doesn’t mean that prescient dreams are possible. If you can show that the cause/effect thing applies to prescient dreams, fine. But you can’t say ‘Well this poorly understood thing over here sounds like it might allow it’ and have the argument be taken seriously. Right now, our knowledge of the laws of the universe preclude prescient dreams. Until something is found that allows prescient dreams specifically to break these laws, we can go n assuming that they can’t.
That worldview only demands evidence on things that intersect with the world and expect that those things follow the world’s laws. We have some empirical evidence that dreams occur, medical studies, etc. If someone says ‘I dreamt’, then no natural laws have been broken, and the claim can be accepted without empirical studies. ‘God talked to me’ cannot, because right now we have no empirical evidence for god, and many of the concepts of god break natural laws. So that’s a claim that cannot be accepted safely without corroborating evidence.