Your dream characters might be conscious (mentally, syndrome, people)

[Gaylenwoof]

Daniel Kolak is a philosopher and lucid dream researcher who believes that some of the characters who inhabit our nightly dreams might be self-conscious "alters" who generally live short and/or sporadic lives. In other words, when we are dreaming, we are essentially in the grips of a sort of "dissociative disorder" in which different sub-personalities within us interact with each other as more or less "independent" personalities.

This does not seem to be a very popular view, and I have not found much empirical evidence to support it, but intuitively I have this feeling that it might be right - at least to some extent. I'm curious to know if anyone here has thought about this, or has come across any interesting evidence for or against the idea. Can you see any logical arguments for why it could not be true?

For those who are interested, here are some quotes from neurologist Jay Lombard concerning Kolak's idea. He uses the term 'synchronic consciousness' for the idea that multiple, individually self-conscious personalities can coexist within a single person. One of his central interests is whether or not Kolak's view about the nature of dreams can be neurologically justified and, if true, what it might tell us about the personalities of ordinary people as well as the possible mechanism by which full-blown dissociative disorders could emerge in a person's waking life.

Quotes from "Synchrnoic Consciousness from a Neurological Point of View:The Philosophical Foundations for Neuroethics" in Synthese, Vol. 162, No. 3 (Jun., 2008), pp.439-450. ( http://www.jstor.org/stable/40271007 )

All these selves, according to Kolak - even the purely imaginary ones that exist as such only in our dreams- are not just conscious but also self-conscious, with beliefs, intentions, living lives informed by memories (confabulatory, in the case of the fictional ones) and personal histories.

What makes this plausible from the standpoint of the neurological basis of our experience, in my view, are the three fundamentally related physiological processes of neuronal generalization and specialization, the integration and binding of divergent systems, and ultimately the coordination of whole- whole relation through which the brain is able to generate representations of others that exist, as such, within and through the very system that renders them.

...many neurologists who work with autistic children... are convinced that part of what is going on in autistic...brains is that they do not "feel the subjective presence of others"...(Kolak's work with Hirsteinand Ramachandran regarding GSR responses from autistic children to faces versus objects lends further support to this view.)

One of the missing pieces has been that no computational/mathematical model has been forthcoming; perhaps Kolak's compactification topology will turn out to have more than just a philosophical explanatory function, provided that we can further decode the way in which mathematical functions and logical circuitry allowing a diversely unified phenomenological manifold to emerge are parsed at the molecular level. […] What we do know, as neurologists and as philosophers, is that, contrary to our perception, there is no single locus or homunculus or unified field of consciousness in which all information is centralized and governed. Rather, consciousness is itself comprised of a multitude of diverse and variant braincircuits self-organized and collectively integrated.

In schizophrenia, one of the genetic abnormalities recently identified involves the enzyme glutamic acid decarboxylase (GAD). This enzyme is responsible for the synthesis of the neurotransmitter GABA found between specific subsets of neurons. The loss ofGABA within these synaptic realms-specific domains of cell-to-cell relation disrupts the coordination of these neighboring and interfacing neurons, literally producing what has been phenomenologically recognized as a loosening of association.

The lives of our dream characters are short,they are like Korsakoff 's or dementia patients, and in the case of our dreams expire in brief little Buddha instants. But the fact is that typically we don't know what the characters in our dreams will say before they say it....

What happens if they don't expire when they are supposed to? […] For what happens if these other selves in me don't expire is that you end up with MPD, schizophrenia, or some other pathology along the wide spectrum of what he calls "Identification Disorder Syndrome."

But, in Kolak's view, even in normal cases, our various selves do in fact continue to live, and in some cases evolve, in our brains, sometimes taking over (the subject cannot always, if ever, tell) and sometimes providing additional perspectives on our lives, with game-theoretical, team like substitutions possible all while keeping up the illusion that I am but one self in one world. […] Our childhood personalities, the various personas and roles we play and have played in our everyday lives, all have an independent existence within us, vying for supremacy, complicating our psychologies, sometimes getting in each other's way....

In case you got a bit lost in the technical jargon, Lombard is basically suggesting that there are some credible neurological grounds for thinking that even normal people in everyday life are, in effect, "multiple personalities" but we flow seamlessly through them so we don't notice - unless something goes wrong, as in the case of dissociative disorders. But, in any case, it is not implausible to think that short-lived sub-personalities do, indeed, interact in dreams.

[Utopian Slums]

Makes sense to me. I often feel like "another self" when i dream. I found this particularly interesting:




contrary to our perception, there is no single locus or homunculus or unified field of consciousness in which all information is centralized and governed. Rather, consciousness is itself comprised of a multitude of diverse and variant braincircuits self-organized and collectively integrated.

In schizophrenia, one of the genetic abnormalities recently identified involves the enzyme glutamic acid decarboxylase (GAD). This enzyme is responsible for the synthesis of the neurotransmitter GABA found between specific subsets of neurons. The loss ofGABA within these synaptic realms-specific domains of cell-to-cell relation disrupts the coordination of these neighboring and interfacing neurons, literally producing what has been phenomenologically recognized as a loosening of association.