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Why does my brain have to simulate so much of weird and stressful bullshit adventures which can never happen IRL? If it mostly is concerned about how to move th

Why does my brain have to simulate so much of weird and stressful bullshit adventures which can never happen IRL? If it mostly is concerned about how to move the limbs then why I never remember actually using my body to do anything in a dream except the sensation I invoke to fly? To me it feels like my dreaming brain is mostly simulating emotional experiences.

ugh123 2y ago
During sleep the brain might be constantly simulating past experiences, movement, and altered consequences as a possible "re-training" model. Some of those simulations may have outsized emotional moments which "jolt" our consciousness enough to perceive the dream. Painful memories are often an easy target for these simulations to use because they have more definition that many other memories.
RoyalHenOil 2y ago
These unrealistic adventures may not be for training you how to deal with unrealistic adventures. These dreams could be serving a much lower-level purpose: training your brain's deeper inner workings that you do not have direct conscious access to. Flying may help with fine tuning visual-spatial processing, for example.
- usrusr 2y ago
  yeah, it's never really flying for me, but lots of navigating across fantasy landscapes in odd modes of transport like chairlifts and ski runs. But the perception of those landscapes is very much including bird's eye view, only that it's never "me" at the elevated camera position. Whatever story happens, it simply isn't told exclusively through "subjective camera". (does dreaming even involve first person view? I think it's more like a faux awareness of being somewhere than faux vision) It's not flying to me, more like being able to "feel a map projection". But that's certainly close to flying, I guess it's the same category of dream from a "why" standpoint. And once the "i can fly!" part of off the table, I think the "why" is rather obvious: get used to thinking in larger topologies than what we encounter in sedentary day to day life.
jonnycomputer 2y ago
off-policy, offline, generative experience replay: these are all efficient ways to maximize our learning with finite experiences to learn from. for example, its hard to learn from rare experiences, and dangerous to learn from very hazardous situations you'd not want to be in. However, as you pointed out, generative experience replay runs the risk of learning from counterfactual or impossible experiences. To mitigate this risk, we need a discriminator network, not only to distinguish dream from reality but to judge their plausibility (e.g. flying by flapping wings vs dreaming you took a vacation in Tahiti that you never took vs dreaming about forgetting to do your homework).

ugh123 2y ago

During sleep the brain might be constantly simulating past experiences, movement, and altered consequences as a possible "re-training" model. Some of those simulations may have outsized emotional moments which "jolt" our consciousness enough to perceive the dream. Painful memories are often an easy target for these simulations to use because they have more definition that many other memories.

RoyalHenOil 2y ago

These unrealistic adventures may not be for training you how to deal with unrealistic adventures. These dreams could be serving a much lower-level purpose: training your brain's deeper inner workings that you do not have direct conscious access to. Flying may help with fine tuning visual-spatial processing, for example.

usrusr 2y ago
yeah, it's never really flying for me, but lots of navigating across fantasy landscapes in odd modes of transport like chairlifts and ski runs. But the perception of those landscapes is very much including bird's eye view, only that it's never "me" at the elevated camera position. Whatever story happens, it simply isn't told exclusively through "subjective camera". (does dreaming even involve first person view? I think it's more like a faux awareness of being somewhere than faux vision) It's not flying to me, more like being able to "feel a map projection". But that's certainly close to flying, I guess it's the same category of dream from a "why" standpoint. And once the "i can fly!" part of off the table, I think the "why" is rather obvious: get used to thinking in larger topologies than what we encounter in sedentary day to day life.

jonnycomputer 2y ago

off-policy, offline, generative experience replay: these are all efficient ways to maximize our learning with finite experiences to learn from. for example, its hard to learn from rare experiences, and dangerous to learn from very hazardous situations you'd not want to be in. However, as you pointed out, generative experience replay runs the risk of learning from counterfactual or impossible experiences. To mitigate this risk, we need a discriminator network, not only to distinguish dream from reality but to judge their plausibility (e.g. flying by flapping wings vs dreaming you took a vacation in Tahiti that you never took vs dreaming about forgetting to do your homework).