Dreaming - Simulation Of Social Reality

Dreaming is the most universal and most regularly occurring, as well as a perfectly natural and physiological (as opposed to pathological), altered state of consciousness. Thus, any plausible (empirical or philosophical) theory of consciousness should also describe and explain dreaming as a major state of consciousness. Most theories of consciousness, however, do not consider dreaming at all or at least do not discuss the results of dream research in any detail. 

Dreaming presents a particularly difficult challenge for externalist, embodied, and enactive types of theories of consciousness. They all anchor the existence and nature of consciousness to something in the world external to the brain, or to some kind of brain-world relations that, at least partly, reside outside the brain. By contrast, the empirical evidence from dream research shows that full-blown, complex subjective experiences similar with or identical to experiences during wakefulness, regularly and universally happen during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. The conscious experiences we have during dreaming are isolated from behavioural and perceptual interactions with the environment, which refutes any theory that states that organism-environment interaction or other external relationships are constitutive of the existence of consciousness. 

A few theories of consciousness have, however, taken dreaming as a central starting point in their conceptualization and explanation of consciousness. When dreaming is taken seriously, ideas about the nature of consciousness end to converge on internalist theories of consciousness that take consciousness and dreaming to be varieties of the same internal phenomenon, whose main function is to simulate reality.

Within empirical dream research, definitions of dreaming have been highly variable and often motivated by underlying theoretical background assumptions held by the theorist. Thus, the pure description of the 'explanandum', which should come first in any scientific inquiry, has perhaps been biased by a pre-existing theory as to what might count as the 'explanans', the entities, processes, and concepts that are supposed to explain the phenomenon.

Dreaming not only places us into an immersive (virtual) physical reality, but also immerses us into a (virtual) social reality: in dreams we are surrounded by close friends and family members, schoolmates, teachers and students, spouses, romantic partners, old crushes, colleagues and bosses, celebrities, politicians, acquaintances, strangers, and mobs as well as monsters and other fictitious characters from movies and video games. All are there in dream simulation with us as simulated characters—avatars—and we interact with these avatars in multiple ways: we perceive, recognize, and semantically classify them, we communicate and talk with them, we collaborate with them, help them, criticize them, fight them, escape them, fear them, and love them. At least intuitively, there is no doubt that in our dreams, we live rich and colourful social lives, even if only simulated ones.

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