Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!markh
From: markh@csd4.milw.wisc.edu (Mark William Hopkins)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: the surrealism of dreams
Message-ID: <1763@csd4.milw.wisc.edu>
Date: 31 Mar 89 04:48:36 GMT
References: <74@opmvax.kpo.fi> <10228@nsc.nsc.com>
Sender: news@csd4.milw.wisc.edu
Reply-To: markh@csd4.milw.wisc.edu (Mark William Hopkins)
Organization: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Lines: 23

In article <10228@nsc.nsc.com> andrew@nsc.nsc.com (andrew) writes:
>In article <74@opmvax.kpo.fi>, ylikoski@opmvax.kpo.fi (Antti Ylikoski tel +358 0 457 2704) writes:
>> I would like to try to contribute to the discussion involving dreams
>> During a dream one's "symbol processing engine" roams free
>
>I have read in at least a couple of places (exact refs unknown) that sleep
>would be a useful mechanism for consolidating memory (sculpting those
>hyperdimensional basins) and for unlearning. I guess these are really two
>expressions for essentially the same process.

And now I'd like to add in a third viewpoint.  It is known among sleep
researchers that the seemingly nonsensical quality of dreams arises because the
medulla is sending out random signals during this phase of sleep, which the
neocortex tries is damned best to weave into a logically consistent framework.

It is well known among people who work with NP complete problems that very
efficient algorithms can be devised if it randomness is allowed.  Also,
randomizers go a long way towards shaking processors out of ruts
(read: infinte loops).

So I would say that we dream in order to keep ourselves from being rigidly
mechanical machines and thereby increase our intelligence by a whole order
of magnitude.