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View Full Version : Immortality in the Form of Recursive Dream-Lives


deptstoremook
2005-09-11, 07:48
Let me open this by saying this isn't a debate thread. This is something that has been on my mind and I want to organize it into words, and I feel it may be interesting to some of you on this forum. Let me further state I was unsure what forum to put this in, but this seemed like the best choice.

I don't want it to go in Science of the Damned because it is more cerebral and speculative than the usual dream topics.

A week ago, I watched a film entitled Waking Life. The film details the dreams of an unnamed character, as he experiences multiple false awakenings and engages in dialogues (and listens to monologues) about dreams and other related topics.

This was one of those artsy films, which I usually hate, but this one sort of stuck in my head, and has to date.

One of the ideas expressed had always floated around my mind, but I really started analyzing it after the film--what if, when we die (or are about to), we enter into a protracted dream, which encompasses an entire life, and what if, at the end of that one, there is another dream?

In essence, what if immortality existed in an endless chain of dream-universes?

My consideration of this idea in the first place has its roots in my fear--worse than fear, actually--of death. I personally want to cling to any type of eternal consciousness, because I have not been able to accept death as an atheist would view it.

I have noticed when I dream at night, in this life, my dreams are often more shadowy and I am less lucid than I am in waking life. This has led me to view the closing lines of TS Eliot's The Hollow Men in a different way.

quote:

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.



If my current life is a dream, and its awareness level is 100, then my next "dream-life" may have an awareness level of, say, 60. If this awareness continues decreasing but never reaching 0 (true death), then there will be no sudden death, merely an infinite petering out of awareness--eternal life, but not the way I would have liked it.

Unfortunately, this seems to be the most likely; the human brain, after all, has its limits, and carrying on these parallel worlds to successive degrees would naturally become more and more difficult, and thus the worlds more and more obscure, with time.

There is some poetic justice to the idea of recursive lives, though--if I were able to look back on my previous "lives," they would be more and more lucid, until, if I could look back far enough, they would be infinitely clear, and I would be infinitely aware--God, in other words.

I will grant that this is essentially an extension of the classic "brain in a vat" scenario, and that it is thus unprovable, but I am not submitting it as an argument, rather as what I called it just previously--an extension of an ancient philosophical scenario.

This part of my post is digressionary and fragmented and thus, I understand if you don't wish to read it.

I also need to mention the subject of time. Obviously, in this situation, time becomes infinitely arbitrary, because it allows an entire lifetime to exist in the blink of an eye. This beggars a real-world question: how long do regular dreams last? The obvious answer is "however long you sleep," or "however long your REM cycle lasts," but I posit that if we accept that time is subjective, then a regular, night-time dream, could last for an eternity, which opens up an entire other can of worms.

I know there must be a name for this line of reasoning, the seemingly paradoxical fact that I may have, just last evening, spent an eternity in a dream, only to wake up remembering only brief fragments. It essentially asks--am I in two places at once?

But I have digressed, and this post has become fragmented. Time is a beast that deserves its own topic, and so I will stop now. If you have read this far, I applaud you and hope you will reply with comments or thoughts of your own.

Edit: The short story An Incident at Owl Creek is a crude example of what I'm discussing, and is easily available online.

[This message has been edited by deptstoremook (edited 09-11-2005).]

Silly Stick
2005-09-11, 11:25
If it were all just a dream, where would the inspiration for the dreams come from? The dreams we have at night are a result of what has happened in the day. To create a whole world, a whole universe, thousands of people we meet everyday and everyone different, would require a hell of alot of imagination, and one sleeping person would not be able to do that. Eventually through lack of contact with seperate entities the waters would become stagnant. The dreams would become repetative.

AngryFemme
2005-09-11, 14:21
Waking Life is a great flick!

Your post was thought-provoking. It would also, as you pointed out, be a nice afterlife idea for atheists to subscribe to.

Upon death, the cartesian theatre that serves as our sense of self would immediately disappear if it were disconnected from the *main server* (the brain). It would then be seemingly impossible to actually have a sense of being the experiencer. If the brain in the vat could somehow conjure up the qualia necessary to have even quick bursts of a dreamlike state, would that not constitute actual consciousness, thereby rendering you alive? So in effect, you would not be dead at all. It wouldn't really be afterlife.

Death is just that final. But I bet the AI community is all over it, working to give us at the very least a simulated "afterlife". I'd sign up.

Daniel Dennett claims that:

"there are no such thing as qualia; the quality of conscious experience is a result of micro-judgements made by various parts of our brain. For Dennett there is no reality to the subjective quality of our experience over an above the fact that there seems to be that subjective quality." - Guy Douglas

http://tinyurl.com/bcay4

Daz
2005-09-11, 23:32
Providing you believe in the cartesian theatre...I don't.

-Your brain is responsible for your dreams.

-When you die your brain stops functioning.

-When you die you do not dream.

AngryFemme
2005-09-12, 02:06
Neither do I. But if you're going to discuss it with a dualist who not only wants to believe that consciousness can be extended after death, but that it can be actually experienced as such- you almost have to entertain the point just for conversation's sake.

http://www.totse.com/bbs/wink.gif (http://www.totse.com/bbs/wink.gif)