Path: utzoo!dciem!dretor!nrcaer!sce!cognos!rayt
From: rayt@cognos.uucp (R.)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: the surrealism of dreams
Message-ID: <5698@cognos.UUCP>
Date: 28 Mar 89 13:44:35 GMT
References: <74@opmvax.kpo.fi>
Reply-To: rayt@cognos.UUCP (R.)
Organization: Cognos Inc., Ottawa, Canada
Lines: 56

In article <74@opmvax.kpo.fi> Andy Ylikoski writes:
>I would like to try to contribute to the discussion involving dreams
>"not following the usual laws of nature".
 
>The following is my attempt to make a stab at it:
 
>One aspect of one's behaviour can be described as symbol processing
>driven by events in both one's external world and in his nonverbal
>"internal reality" consisting of feelings and similar things.  During
>a dream one's "symbol processing engine" roams free, and this is known
>to be good for one's mental health.  (It is known that the deprivation
>of the dreaming stage of the sleep, the REM sleep, (for Rapid Eye
>Movement) is harmful to one's mental health.)

Some interesting things we know about the phenomenon of sleep:

  1) the symbol processing engine `roams free'
  2) it is a requirement for mental health
  3) solutions to problems can be discovered during the process

I will also add a forth (in opposition to Janice Jopin's "its all the
same f__king day")

  4) a sense of resolution of (minor) emotional stresses and renewal
     after sleep

Another puzzle about mental activity is that one seems to be able to search
the memory space without an explicit search key (e.g. a `lookup' of someone's
name which escape you for the moment). These items (as well as the obvious
database retrieval analogy which underlies it) make me wonder whether one is
doing a, perhaps systematic, exhaustive search and best fit resolution of
particular domains during sleep.

Clearly, this satisfies `roaming free'. The requirement for mental health
and the resolution of emotional stresses, I contend, could be satisfied if
the resource that is expended for such a process exceeds that which could be
allocated during waking hours (that is, both the search/resolution exercise
and consciousness cannot be undertaken simultaneously), and these resolutions
MUST be made (the discomfiture which they cause increases as their resolution
is postponed, etc.). Solutions to problems now resolves into a search and the
undefinability of insight becomes a learned and practiced heuristic set. This
would also explain how one can search without explicitly knowing what one is
looking for, though one can RECOGNIZE it when it is seen. The difference in
being able to do unkeyed lookup while awake and resolution only(?) during
sleep would be the difference in resource allocation (that is, one must
CHANGE the system during resolution, while simple lookup is clearly less
expensive).

Is this taking the computer analogy beyond respectable limits?

							R.
-- 
Ray Tigg                          |  Cognos Incorporated
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