When you sleep, the primal brain keeps the lights on for your eventual return, however by all practical definitions your mind as you know it ceases to exist. Electrical activity remains, but the patterns of conscious thought do not.
When you awaken, reality rushes back like water from a burst damn. You come to grips with your situation nearly instantly, but there is a moment during which the circuitry must process and interpret the state of the system and the memories freshly burned into long term storage. It is in this moment that the thing you consider self is baked from the raw materials of synaptic connections.
I know these memories, yet they did not occur in the span of my consciousness. I know this body, the story of its scars, yet I have no other method by which to confirm the events which made me who I am. If my mind should change as I dream, then I will have no frame of reference in which to understand these changes.
We can develop technology to interface with the conscious mind, to pump sensational data directly into the nervous system, however we are highly uncertain of the mechanisms of subjective perception. The terms "emergent property" and "illusion" are thrown around with equal support, however what do these actually mean? They both refer to the effect of a complex system gaining the capacity to self-observe; one implies a greater function, the other a delusional product of a cyclical computation. Neither provide satisfactory explaination, but can you really use subjective perception to describe subjective perception? What if the experience is entirely different for each individual?
The serious concerns of a warped mind, or part of the premise for a personal project? Maybe a little of both.
I woke up this morning and sketched this extremely quickly. It's rare for me to just grab a pencil and draw something without knowing what it's going to be, but you could say this is a case of dream imagery.
Terrible photograph (in fact it's only so visible because of the degree to which I altered the coloration in Photoshop), but the thing is far too large for me to scan at home, and I wouldn't want to bother until it's ready for some digital paint work.
When you awaken, reality rushes back like water from a burst damn. You come to grips with your situation nearly instantly, but there is a moment during which the circuitry must process and interpret the state of the system and the memories freshly burned into long term storage. It is in this moment that the thing you consider self is baked from the raw materials of synaptic connections.
I know these memories, yet they did not occur in the span of my consciousness. I know this body, the story of its scars, yet I have no other method by which to confirm the events which made me who I am. If my mind should change as I dream, then I will have no frame of reference in which to understand these changes.
We can develop technology to interface with the conscious mind, to pump sensational data directly into the nervous system, however we are highly uncertain of the mechanisms of subjective perception. The terms "emergent property" and "illusion" are thrown around with equal support, however what do these actually mean? They both refer to the effect of a complex system gaining the capacity to self-observe; one implies a greater function, the other a delusional product of a cyclical computation. Neither provide satisfactory explaination, but can you really use subjective perception to describe subjective perception? What if the experience is entirely different for each individual?
The serious concerns of a warped mind, or part of the premise for a personal project? Maybe a little of both.
I woke up this morning and sketched this extremely quickly. It's rare for me to just grab a pencil and draw something without knowing what it's going to be, but you could say this is a case of dream imagery.
Terrible photograph (in fact it's only so visible because of the degree to which I altered the coloration in Photoshop), but the thing is far too large for me to scan at home, and I wouldn't want to bother until it's ready for some digital paint work.