Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!uxc!iuvax!rutgers!att!mtuxo!lzfme!jwi
From: jwi@lzfme.att.com (Jim Winer @ AT&T, Middletown, NJ)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: the surrealism of dreams
Summary: WHERE clause
Message-ID: <1233@lzfme.att.com>
Date: 30 Mar 89 18:01:59 GMT
References: <74@opmvax.kpo.fi> <5698@cognos.UUCP>
Organization: AT&T, Lincroft NJ
Lines: 50

In article <5698@cognos.UUCP>, rayt@cognos.uucp (R.) writes:
| In article <74@opmvax.kpo.fi> Andy Ylikoski writes:
| |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'
| 
| 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'.
| (omitted)
| 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).

I don't think this is a matter of roaming free, but more like using
an alternate where clause. For example, we would normally retrieve a
record on the WHERE Name=<name> but we can't remember the
name. During sleep, we retrieve on an alternate key with a much
broader search. For example, WHERE HairColor=brown and
State=CA. This could result in hundreds of retrievals giving the
impression of free roaming, but is actually just an extended search
based on different attributes that we subconciously remember.

Jim Winer ..!lzfme!jwi 

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