Daniel Dennett is quite annoying. His view of consciousness is completely absurd, for example. I’m not going to defend my position here because this isn’t exactly what this post is about.
In case you don’t know, Daniel Dennett is a major analytical philosopher, the English-speaking tradition of philosophy dating from the late nineteenth century CE with the rejection of Hegelian idealism, continuing today and apparently also including Polish philosophers for some reason. Bertrand Russell is a good example. It was once described in ‘Radical Philosophy’ like this: a Heideggerian says something like “Die Welt weltet”, and analytic philosophy comes along and says “Where is this Welt, and when exactly did it start welting?”. It is actually mainly my own background and I have a lot of respect for it, partly because I think postmodernism is a good way of making excuses for how things are politically and socially without coming up with a solution to them, and that comes out of the continental tradition. I’d also distinguish analytic philosophy from other viable philosophical approaches taken by anglophones such as that of William Blake, who is unsurprisingly an outsider and apparently linked to the Muggletonians, about whom I know very little. Sarada is the expert on Blake, but for what it’s worth I think of him as an English Romantic. I don’t know if that’s fair.
Recently, Dennett was involved in a movement referred to as the “Brights”, whose aim was to further metaphysical naturalism. Metaphysical naturalism is often treated as if it’s synonymous with atheism, but in fact it’s a specialised form of atheism which is radically different, for instance, from Marxist atheism and the South Asian Samkhya and Carvaka. I had a conversation with a White bloke the other day who was atheist because of karma, a view also found in South Asian thought. The basic idea there is that because karma is a universal law governing the working of the Universe, there’s no need to suppose that God exists. Although I’m theist, I do find this interesting on an intellectual level, mainly because it’s so unlike metaphysical naturalism but still strongly atheist. Metaphysical naturalism is the idea that only natural forces and laws operate in the Universe, i.e. there is no supernatural realm and therefore no God or other deities. Obviously I don’t agree with this, but that isn’t why I find Dennett annoying.
The Brights were founded by Dennett and Dawkins, among other people whose names don’t come to mind right now. Other metaphysically naturalistic atheists, such as Christopher Hitchens, have criticised the name as appearing to imply intellectual superiority. It reminds me a bit of the stereotypical Mensa attitude. To be fair, I’m not sure this was the intention so much as an attempt to come up with a positive-sounding name. Brights use the word “super” to describe people such as myself who have supernatural and/or mystical elements as part of our view. This actually makes me sound like Wonder Woman or something, so it’s okay really. Nonetheless, the Brights believe themselves to be right and us to be wrong. It isn’t an unusual position to see oneself as correct by contrast with others whose opinions differ, so that is also fine.
One of Dennett’s more bizarre positions is that lucid dreams are not experiences. This strikes me as a kind of ideological commitment resulting from it being a logical conclusion of his other views about consciousness. However, it’s also an elaboration of another, simpler position of his with which I actually do agree, in a sense: that dreams are not experiences in general. I do differ with this view but also think it captures something significant about the nature of consciousness, particularly wakefulness. Looking at them from a position of being awake, it seems to me that dreaming could well represent the wakeful consciousness attempting to make sense of the “junk” present in one’s mind on waking. There are some reasons why this may not be true, but others which are hard to reconcile with it not being so. For instance, someone I know once dreamt that she, note the tense in this phrase, has to cry three tears to save a toad’s life, and I could hear her trying to do this several minutes before she woke up. On the other hand, I was once dreaming while the radio was on and the sequence of events on the radio is time-reversed in my dream. The dream ends with something happening on the radio which in waking experience happened before something which starts the dream, which can be explained if dreams are false memories created during REM sleep.
The idea that lucid dreams are not experiences is kind of arse-about-face. It’s a conclusion Dennett is forced into due to his expressed view of consciousness which is counter-intuitive to me, and I’d think to most other people. There is an odd phenomenon in consciousness where immediately prior events are “re-written” by memory. For instance, MP3 files when played back often have periods of silence in them before loud notes which the listener doesn’t notice because they’re eclipsed by the slightly later event. Dennett uses a similar illusion called the “phi phenomenon” where lights of two colours flashed in succession leads to the perception that a single light is moving back and forth and changing colour. He offers two explanations for this, which he calls “Orwellian” and “Stalinesque”. In the Orwellian hypothesis, like Winston’s experience with the fingers (or Picard’s experience with the lights in ‘Star Trek’, which is a direct steal), perception is revised after the fact of being experienced. Stalinesquely, the forthcoming experience is revised before reaching consciousness like a show trial whose verdict is pre-decided. These two versions of what happens don’t require any difference in the model of what’s going on in the brain. The only difference is in when the perception becomes an object of consciousness. The claim is then that the reason there is no difference between the two is that this account of consciousness as emerging at a certain point is an error based on the legacy of misunderstanding consciousness as Cartesian – that is, that living humans consist of two substances, the soul and the body, whereof the former is conscious and dimensionless and the latter occupies space and is not conscious, with the two interacting, according to Descartes within the pineal gland. Dennett believes that we are still too attached to this kind of account, although we don’t literally believe it any more, and that consciousness is not a special, circumscribed state, has no subject of experience (I have sympathy with this bit) and is actually the flow of information from place to place.
Applying this to non-lucid dreaming, information flow would occur on waking. With lucid dreaming, we only have illusory choice and experiencing in the moment according to this account, which also applies as far as Dennett is concerned to waking life. Dreaming and lucid dreaming are primarily useful illustrations of his general theory here rather than objects of study themselves.
Obviously I think he’s wrong. He also casts doubt on the existence of qualia, which are the essential qualities of experience whose existence cannot rationally be doubted. Qualia, put another way, are what people refer to when they say things like “your red might be my blue”, which captures the notion well but doesn’t actually work in detail because of the network of experiences and how they relate to one another. It’s important to decide what are and aren’t qualia, because once one declares something as a quale it’s placed beyond question and that restricts possible arguments. For instance, Nkechi Amare Diallo could claim that her Black identity is a quale, at which point White people identifying as Black suddenly becomes sanctified in some realm beyond criticism. I actually do think the mental perception of the possibility of becoming pregnant is a good example of a quale which is not intuitively so, because it sometimes leads to radical departures of opinion regarding the ethics of reproductive choice, and that does in fact correspond to “no uterus, no opinion” as the position is sometimes rather crudely expressed. However, the existence of quale cannot be doubted, and if someone is led into the position where they can make such a claim, it comes across to me as a weird ideological commitment to an untenable position rather than something which can be attached to an account of consciousness.
From wakeful experience, we tend to perceive dreaming as something which occurs while we’re asleep, and individual dreams as prospects which occur in the future of our wakefulness before we fall asleep and in the past of our wakefulness when we have woken up. With closer examination, we might conclude that dreams are not experiences but attempts by a wakeful mind to make sense of the clutter present in our minds when we awake. Although I think this is incorrect, it does work well as an illustration that the chronology of dreams is not what we might assume. Lucid dreaming is said to be encouraged by always recounting dreams in the present tense. This is somewhat confused by the fact that not all languages have a present tense, and this raises a further question: are there languages which have a way of expressing dream time?
Before I answer this question, I want to outline my understanding of states of consciousness. I believe it makes sense to say there are six states of consciousness: wakefulness, dreaming, dreamless sleep, hypnosis, meditation and Ganzfeld. There’s also a very strong tendency to prioritise wakefulness above the others, to the extent that it’s seen as the only realistic state of consciousness and the state which dictates the nature of time. Dream logic is not seen as proper logic. A friend of mine recently observed, interestingly, that although I had recently dreamt about the King, that didn’t mean there wouldn’t still be Queen dreams. My own attitude towards states of consciousness is rather different. I believe that several or all of those states are of equal, or perhaps incommensurate, status. The list I’ve just made was from a wakeful state. It’s equally possible to dream of a completely different list. I’m not convinced that hypnosis is a valid state of consciousness but I do believe it’s neither dreaming nor dreamless sleep. There are “state” and “non-state” views on hypnosis. The state view is that a hypnotised subject has entered an altered, more suggestible state of consciousness, which is supported by their alleged inability, in some cases, to recall the events which took place during it. The non-state version is that hypnosis is a form of role-play in a kind of theatrical setting, which doesn’t just apply to stage hypnotism but also the likes of hypnotherapy. That idea is not supposed to contradict its efficacy as a therapy, incidentally. Ganzfeld is the other state which could do with a bit of explanation. This can be introduced by relaxation and sensory deprivation although it also occurs at one’s bidding, perhaps with a bit of practice. It may not may not be a healthy state.
Insofar as each of these is a valid state of consciousness, none has priority over any others. Each has unique features. As I’m mainly contrasting dreaming and wakefulness here, taking them equally seriously, the wakeful mind can have a view of dreaming that is either the detritus of dormancy or a sequence of experiences which occur between successive experiences of wakefulness, but this is only the view of the waking mind and is no more valid than that of dreaming. There is still a relationship between dreaming experiences and the senses, for instance because a cold night might be associated with dreaming of the Arctic or because some experience one had the previous day influences the dream. From the perspective of dreaming, wakeful consciousness influences one’s experience but there are oddities about its temporality because with dreams of any length, it can often be difficult to locate a moment when the dream begins and, as I’ve said before, some of my dreams involve things like “having always sat on the roof”, i.e. my dream is of climbing out of a bedroom window onto the roof just like I always have for years. From a dreaming perspective, whatever waking life makes of them, dreaming consciousness is very different in terms of the passage of time and even if it turns out that dreams are squished-up false memories of stuff happening immediately before waking from a daytime perspective, this has no more or less validity than whatever the dreaming mind thinks of wakefulness.
Given all that, this is the question I am mainly interested in answering here: how do we refer to dream time? English uses the present tense to refer to “tenseless” things, such as saying that “one plus one is/equals two”. We don’t usually say “one plus one used to equal two” or “one plus one will be two next Thursday” unless we’re trying to make some kind of rhetorical point about eternal verities. I have said in the past, from a waking perspective anyway, that the events of dreams should be referred to in the aorist. This is in fact a somewhat inaccurate way of describing what I’m doing when I seem to use the present tense.
The word “aorist” originates from the Ancient Greek “ἀόριστος”, which breaks down as “ἀ-” – not – and “όριστος” – definite. In other words, “indefinite”, “undefined” and also simple – the unadorned, plain form of the verb. In English, we might identify this with the simple present indicative except that in English this usually puts an S, an “-eth” or “-est” on the end, so it isn’t usually unadorned. As an ahistorical, perhaps an aorist, word, it seems to work quite well as a way of describing events which do not occur in the waking passage of time, but in fact the Ancient Greek usage is to refer to the past. It’s used as a narrative tense, so it does make sense if dreams are retold as stories to use the aorist, but in certain circumstances can also refer to the present or future. It’s also worth mentioning that there is aspect as well as tense involved here. Aspect is how the action described by a verb occurs over time, i.e. whether it’s a one-time short term event, a repeated action or a continuous one. For instance, “I rowed” and “I sowed” might involve grabbing the oars just once and sculling briefly and putting a single seed in the ground, or they might refer to rowing across a river or walking across a field broadcasting a full bowl of seed. English seems to have lost the ability to distinguish easily between these, but many other languages actually focus more on that element of time than on tense. Hence aspect is still relevant to dreaming as experience, or perceived experience but tense may be misleading.
Sanskrit also has an aorist, which is relevant because it happens to be used to discuss consciousness a lot. In fact I almost used the word “samadhi” to describe what I called “meditation” just now. There are two aorists in Sanskrit, one which is simply preterite indicative, like our own simple past, and an injunctive mood, which is also found in Homeric Greek, which could be used as an imperative or subjunctive, usually for prohibitions in later Sanskrit.
Hence the problem is that although there is something out there called the aorist, which is not in any case present in English, it actually tends to express the past although it technically needn’t and the literal meaning of the word “aorist” is not perfectly reflected in the actual meaning of the word. From the perspective of wakefulness, I would want to express dreaming experience as occurring in a kind of abstract time. Imagine a three-dimensional line graph. The space within that graph could be said to be located in a particular place in the sense that it might be on the page of a book or a computer display, but there need be no region of the Universe consisting of a graph, which can in principle be visited. Time and space in dreaming are virtual. Events can be located relative to each other temporally only within the dream, but need to be referred to outside of it, but referring to them in the past tense doesn’t do them justice.
Calling this post “Dream Time” makes it sound like a reference to the idea Australian Aboriginals are said by Western anthropologists to have about the primordial state of the world, but as usual it’s important to examine this critically. If it turns out that the kind of wakeful consciousness we have today in the West is highly contingent, maybe our lives are surrounded temporally by a sleep, not in the sense of absence of consciousness but as a different kind of consciousness. I know very little about this and feel it would be culturally insensitive to say too much about it, as well as inappropriate for the cultural and environmental milieu I live in, but the term itself suggests to me an entirely valid concept of a kind of timeless eternity out of which our wakefulness condenses. I have no idea whether this is what anthropologists mean by it or whether it even exists in any Australian Aboriginal culture, but it does make sense although it might give dreaming unwarranted priority. At this point I could of course read what Wikipedia says about it and pretend I know what I’m talking about, but that doesn’t do it justice.
Behind all this while I’ve been writing is awareness of a particular form of dementia called Lewy Body. This is associated with Parkinsonism, and involves the mixing of dreaming and wakefulness. Although it would seem insensitive to regard this as anything other than a pathological state, it is interesting that this occurs towards the end of waking life. We tend to think of dreaming and wakefulness as sharply differentiated, although when I had B12 deficiency early signs of my psychosis there was some such mixture. Prisoner’s cinema, Charles Bonnet Syndrome, phantosmia and possibly some forms of tinnitus and hearing voices also seem to have things in common with this. Prisoner’s cinema is more like Ganzfeld, and in fact it leads me to wonder whether states of consciousness are to each other like different gears on a car, with Ganzfeld intermediate between dreaming and wakefulness.
People have been known to enter a state of meditation as a prelude to their death. More often, the state of mind immediately before death as monitored by instruments resembles dreamless sleep and this continues immediately after death, with a sudden flash of activity a few minutes later. Once again, it may be inappropriate to refer to these phenomena temporally, as any subjectivity may not experience them in this manner.
This post, I hope, will make a good companion to tomorrow’s, written on International Yoga Day.
A Box Of Chocolates 