The real world versus the other ones
Feb. 11th, 2004 09:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
triskellianI called my friend A, and told her I couldn't do something she'd asked me to do. She insisted I did. I called her unreasonable, and she called me selfish. We shouted, and said hurtful things to each other
... And then I woke up, with the call still unmade. When I phoned A in the real world, I was suffering residual dream-anger with her, and residual dream-guilt, for being so horrible to her. It wasn't a call I'd been dreading: her request, left on my answerphone, was tentative and my reasons for refusal were good. In the real world we chatted happily and made other arrangements, and all was well. But I still felt uneasy about the conversation, my dream-emotions clouding my 'real' ones.
It happened again last night. I dreamt, first, that the essay I was writing last week was returned, marked 'poor'. Then, after waking up and feeling miserable for a while, I had another dream, in which the same essay was marked 'excellent'. I don't know if I'll get the real essay back today or next week, but I'm now having a hard time getting either worried or excited about the possibilities, because both extremes have already happened.
I often experience overlaps between the real world and the various forms of non-real world. When I finish a book I've loved, I see the real world through the lens of the book world for days afterwards. Fictional people and dream people and imagined people inhabit the place I can see out of the corner of my eyes, and they cast shadows and reflections onto their real counterparts. The dream A projected onto the real-world A.
The world is a sort of patchwork of bits of reality, dreams, memories, fiction, and imagination. The real and the imagined and the dreamt and the remembered all bleed into each other at the edges; the fuzzy shapes of memory or dream are overlaid onto the clear, sharp lines of reality - places I have memories of are haunted by ghost versions of me, still doing what I did there, over and over again. Sometimes, especially with conversations, it's hard to remember which bits really happened, and which bits I dreamt or imagined.
... And then I woke up, with the call still unmade. When I phoned A in the real world, I was suffering residual dream-anger with her, and residual dream-guilt, for being so horrible to her. It wasn't a call I'd been dreading: her request, left on my answerphone, was tentative and my reasons for refusal were good. In the real world we chatted happily and made other arrangements, and all was well. But I still felt uneasy about the conversation, my dream-emotions clouding my 'real' ones.
It happened again last night. I dreamt, first, that the essay I was writing last week was returned, marked 'poor'. Then, after waking up and feeling miserable for a while, I had another dream, in which the same essay was marked 'excellent'. I don't know if I'll get the real essay back today or next week, but I'm now having a hard time getting either worried or excited about the possibilities, because both extremes have already happened.
I often experience overlaps between the real world and the various forms of non-real world. When I finish a book I've loved, I see the real world through the lens of the book world for days afterwards. Fictional people and dream people and imagined people inhabit the place I can see out of the corner of my eyes, and they cast shadows and reflections onto their real counterparts. The dream A projected onto the real-world A.
The world is a sort of patchwork of bits of reality, dreams, memories, fiction, and imagination. The real and the imagined and the dreamt and the remembered all bleed into each other at the edges; the fuzzy shapes of memory or dream are overlaid onto the clear, sharp lines of reality - places I have memories of are haunted by ghost versions of me, still doing what I did there, over and over again. Sometimes, especially with conversations, it's hard to remember which bits really happened, and which bits I dreamt or imagined.
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no subject
Date: 2004-02-11 10:46 am (UTC)Quite commonly, this includes the immensely weird experience of dreaming about waking up. As a kid it would occasionally take me several minutes to establish whether or not I had really woken up.
no subject
Date: 2004-02-11 12:11 pm (UTC)Re:
Date: 2004-02-11 01:48 pm (UTC)Sorry I worried you - didn't mean to ;-)
no subject
Date: 2004-02-12 05:08 pm (UTC)Isn't the human mind a very strange and complex thing? Makes you wonder about the whole aftificial intelligence thing too. I mean, this is exactly the sort of thing that makes us as humans a unique kind of intelligence, and it's also the sort of thing that I don't think could ever be replicated in and 'artificial mind'.
Wow - that was deep!
Re:
Date: 2004-02-12 05:43 pm (UTC)Makes you wonder about the whole aftificial intelligence thing too
This is the kind of the thing that researchers tend to figure will emerge naturally from the behaviour of artificial intelligences.
A system smart enough to be called intelligent would certainly have to be able to construct hypotheticals and consider them fairly thoroughly, in order to give an opinion of a hypothetical situation almost as readily as a real one.
But the process of considering hypotheticals is bound to involve some things going on in the AI that are the same or similar to what would happen if the event actually happened.
I'd guess that this happens in humans, and is a large part of what causes confusion as to the difference (especially with "dreams", where we're often temporarily deluded into thinking the event *is* real). But if that's going to happen in AIs too, then they have the potential to be just as uncertain on the topic of what is real.