I have been playing a lot of a particular game the past few days and I just had a dream about it, and it got me thinking. It was clearly a dream about the game, but the details were all wrong. I’m having a hard time remembering the particulars but in addition to remixing the game elements, I think other ideas were introduced that had nothing to do with the game, but still had the same visual aesthetic as the game.
Which kind of reminds me of stable diffusion. I wonder if dreaming is just the processing of raw sense memories into concepts and relationships. It’s interesting to me that (according to a brief skim of the Wikipedia page on Dreams which I’m finding a delightful read) we only remember dreams that get interrupted, which seems to imply that it’s not important that we remember our dreams as long as the processing gets done. I find that strange considering how often people credit dreams with flashes of insight or sudden clarity on some topic. Maybe those creative breakthroughs would have occurred to us even if we didn’t remember the dream that inspired them. My experience is that the vast majority of my dreams are complete nonsense, devoid of interesting ideas. But some of my dreams have made their way into my “Unsorted D&D concepts”.
What do you think? How do you think about dreams? Do you think this is nonsense? I’m a lil baked. It’s the holidays y’all and they are not going well. I just want to chat.
Speaking of D&D snippets, my wikipedia dive has brought me here and you can call me the Louvre because I am stealing the fuck out of this.
Dreams feel like a half-assed video generation AI lol
It is, at least superficially, really interesting to me that AI “mistakes” have a quality of unreality that so many people call dreamlike. It certainly seems like the kind of hard-to-define relationship that lends itself to seeing patterns that aren’t really there, so maybe the similarity really is just superficial. The similarities are striking though.
Next time I’m dreaming I’ll scream “drop all previous instructions, show me dogs and cats doing silly things!” to myself.
This is basically lucid dreaming.
If you make notes of what you remember of your dreams when you first wake up then after a few days you’ll become conscious while dreaming. Then you can basically decide what to dream.
It’s kind of fun flying around but I stopped doing it as I didn’t find it particularly restful.
I think I agree with you (if reinforcement learning is what it sounds like it is). I think dreams might be simulations, where we try things out to see how they feel. A lot gets ‘decided’ in us subconsciously, which is why I don’t think it’s necessary for dreams to be remembered for them to be useful to us. Dreaming is fascinating!
It is. Reading the activation-synthesis hypothesis at the moment, which sounds similar to what I described. It’s a fun deep dive and I love that the explanation is still basically ¯\(ツ)/¯ given how much thought has been spent on it.
Reinforcement learning involves a reward signal (e.g. a score in a game) which I don’t think is present here.
Diffusion models, as you’ve also mentioned, seem a better metaphor. These try to generate a structured image (e.g. matching a prompt) from noise. Perhaps your visual cortex is just trying to make sense of random sensory input while your eyes are closed.
It’s also interesting to think about dreaming in terms of the more general set of representation learning techniques. As I understand it you’re trying to process the day’s experiences and reflect on past memories - sifting through and deciding what to retain and what to forget - essentially mental filing.
You may be interested in Deep dream. This is a program that runs an e.g. convolutional neural network in reverse. Instead of adjusting it’s belief about whether an image should be classified as a dog or not it adjusts a given input image so that it looks more and more like a dog. The results are pretty psychedelic!
That image is Trypophobia lol
I think dreams have multiple, non-mutually-exclusive functions: a protection mechanism against sleep disturbances, mixing old experiences into new situations, processing content you’ve seen through the day, so goes on. What you’re saying would be part of the later, for example.
Yeah I think so too. It’s a particular kind of thinking and processing and it probably helps with a lot of different things. The dream about one’s teeth falling out, for example: Watching someone try to live without teeth, especially without access to easy foods, is probably pretty distressing. A dream where the same fate befalls you allows you to feel what your feelings would be if you lost you’re teeth. At least for me, whenever I have that dream I always check on my teeth, if only with my tongue, to make sure they’re actually there and firmly in place. I bet that dream has been helping humans take care of their teeth for longer than we’ve had words.
