Science Forums 2

[CraigD]

My memories of dreams are certainly important to me, and have shaped my life in many ways as strongly as memories of waking life. I have, on occasion, confused a particularly vivid and realistic dream memory with a waking memory. Upon reflection, however, I’ve never been unable to resolve this confusion – that is, I have no memory that I can’t confidently ascribe to waking life, a dream, or a daydream/fantasy.

The reason I can distinguish dream and waking reality is simply context. Just as I can distinguish if a memory is of an event that occurred during day or night, indoors or out, I’m able to recognize in a memory the context of a dream, with its characteristic not-quite-realism.

What I’m not sure of, is the distinction between objective reality, as I infer it through the process of thought, and purely mental phenomena – “mind”. This is a hard idea for me to articulate, but I descends from a comment Marvin Minsky made concerning the difficulty of defining consciousness, in which he proposed that the term cousciousness is a “semantic null”, a term for something that does not actually exist, either in an objective or a formal sense. Consider the phrase “A torus with a Jordan Curve”. Although it’s a grammatically correct phrase, it’s existence doesn’t imply the existence of the thing it describes. Minsky proposed that “consciousness” is the same. Because we have a word for it, discuss and puzzle over it, doesn’t mean it actually exists. Thus, the difficulty in defining it stems from the presumption that, because the word exists, so must the thing it describes.