You notice absurdity in dreams with your “mind”, which is already corrupted. E.g: you are conjunction-fallacy-man, see something in your dream, which works according to the math, find it absurd, wake up. Sure, active LD practice can increase your awareness, but I cannot see non-neglible result if you are already rising your sanity waterline with some CFAR-ish technics. If previous statement is false, then lucid dreamers are already more rational than general population. I haven’t seen evidences for this hypotesis
Sure, active LD practice can increase your awareness, but I cannot see non-neglible result if you are already rising your sanity waterline with some CFAR-ish technics. If previous statement is false, then lucid dreamers are already more rational than general population. I haven’t seen evidences for this hypotesis
It’s important to note that only a small subset of lucid dreaming techniques are useful for rationality practice, as I mentioned in my first footnote.
For instance, the first method that I used to achieve lucid dreaming as a teenager was to flash blinking lights directly in front of my eyes while going to sleep. This allowed me to see a blinking pattern through my eyelids while sleeping, realize I was asleep, and hence achieve lucidity. While certainly effective at achieving lucid dreaming, this technique has no relevance to rationality at all.
Thus, I wouldn’t expect lucid dreamers in general to be more rational than the general population. A person who sees lucid dreaming as their goal will select for certain things; a person who sees rationality as their goal and lucid dreaming as their tool will select for others.
One way to make sure you will notice absurdity in your dreams is to make a habit of small reality checks while awake. For a while I made a habit of checking clocks twice a few seconds apart and noticing whether the times were consistent, and I doubt this kind of check had any effect other than allowing me to notice a couple of times that I was indeed dreaming. But it might be possible to come up with different checks that would raise my overall sanity waterline. Any suggestions?
I think whether reality checks make you more rational largely depends on what sorts of checks you are using. There are many checks that exploit “surface-level” features of dreams—most commonly inconsistencies in clock faces and written text upon second looks—in order to determine whether one is dreaming. These checks are useful for determining whether you’re asleep but generally limited otherwise.
However, there is one somewhat deeper feature of dreams that IMO provides a more useful opportunity both for reality checks and for rationality practice. Dreams, by their very nature, lack a logical underpinning for events. We tend to find ourselves in the middle of a series of events without much explanation for how or why we arrived there.
Thus, one reality check that I find useful both in dreams and waking life is the thought “where am I, and how did I get here?” For instance, right now I am at my computer, typing a LessWrong post. I got here from waking up in my room and walking downstairs. I got to my room from driving my car after a party with friends last night.
Obviously, this type of reasoning can go on and on. The interesting part is that dreams lack this.
For instance, I recently dreamed that I was on an airplane. I thought to myself “How did I get on this airplane?” Realizing I had no memory of getting to the airport, I became lucid. You might wonder how this applies to rationality. The answer is that “Where am I and how did I get here” can easily apply not only to physical reality, but also to your mind and thoughts. Indeed, it is very similar to “What do you think you know, and how do you think you know it—” one of the classic questions of human rationality.
In my experience, internalizing the general form of this principle has been very useful both for dream checking and for improving rationality.
I will second value of asking “why am I thinking about this?” in real life. It hasn’t changed my dreaming patterns, but when I was in the active habit of it I learned a lot about how thoughts were connected in my head and how my thinking was affected by the behavior of others and more generally by my environment.
The similar “why am I feeling this?” was also a very useful exercise for flattening out post-traumatic triggers. I find it likely that continuing the exercise past that point would teach me a lot about how my feelings are affected by my environment, but I haven’t done it.
(Why? Mostly because it frightens me. Why do I feel fear when I think about it? Because I believe/alieve/intuit that valuable aspects of my personality will be put at risk if I become too aware of the specifics of how my emotions are connected to the things around me. Why do I believe/etc. that? I don’t know; certainly I have no meaningful evidence to that effect, nor any good reason to expect it, beyond the general observation that emotions and affective relations to my environment are pretty fundamental to my personality, and that attending to my emotional responses tends to alter them. Why do I believe the changes are more likely to be ones I negatively value than positively? Because these judgments are coming from a part of my psyche that does not seem to have abstracted its value system in any significant way, it values whatever it happens to value and it values valuing whatever it happens to value, la-la-la-la-la-I-can’t hear you. Do I endorse that? No, not really. Then why do I act on the basis of those judgments? Because the alternative frightens me. I do recognize this just got circular, right? I do indeed. Fear is like that sometimes. I also recognize that I’ve just transitioned from asking myself why I feel what I feel to judging myself for feeling that way, even if I word it as a question, which probably isn’t a great thing.)
Great answer, I know this is something I need to do more in life anyway. So I did a little bit of it just now. Sudden increase in levels of curiosity[so virtuous. Wow.]. I’m so curious I even want to know crap like why my housemate sometimes leaves a spoon stuck in the coffee grounds of the compost container. Obviously they used the spoon to move the grounds in there, but why did they leave it stuck there rather than moving it to the cutlery dip in the wash basin? Now that is an extraordinarily minor detail- take that as an indication of just how motivating it is to suspect that you don’t look closely enough at the details of your life to know whether you’re in a shoddy simulation.
A frequently quoted one is to try to read or write text and pay attention to the individual words (rather than just the “general gist”). I don’t lucid dream, but I’ve certainly had the experience of being frustrated during dreams by having text shift around as I try to read or write it. (I have no idea if I would have had this experience before being primed for it by being told to expect it.)
That’s an excellent point. I must admit, the whole premise that noticing reality-check-violations in my dream-scenarios has some relation to “my overall sanity waterline” (whatever that is) completely fails to resonate with me, so in retrospect it seems I just collapsed the criterion to noticing reality-check-violations in dream scenarios more generally… thereby, as you observe, failing to answer the question. Oops! Thanks for pointing that out.
You notice absurdity in dreams with your “mind”, which is already corrupted. E.g: you are conjunction-fallacy-man, see something in your dream, which works according to the math, find it absurd, wake up. Sure, active LD practice can increase your awareness, but I cannot see non-neglible result if you are already rising your sanity waterline with some CFAR-ish technics. If previous statement is false, then lucid dreamers are already more rational than general population. I haven’t seen evidences for this hypotesis
It’s important to note that only a small subset of lucid dreaming techniques are useful for rationality practice, as I mentioned in my first footnote.
For instance, the first method that I used to achieve lucid dreaming as a teenager was to flash blinking lights directly in front of my eyes while going to sleep. This allowed me to see a blinking pattern through my eyelids while sleeping, realize I was asleep, and hence achieve lucidity. While certainly effective at achieving lucid dreaming, this technique has no relevance to rationality at all.
Thus, I wouldn’t expect lucid dreamers in general to be more rational than the general population. A person who sees lucid dreaming as their goal will select for certain things; a person who sees rationality as their goal and lucid dreaming as their tool will select for others.
One way to make sure you will notice absurdity in your dreams is to make a habit of small reality checks while awake. For a while I made a habit of checking clocks twice a few seconds apart and noticing whether the times were consistent, and I doubt this kind of check had any effect other than allowing me to notice a couple of times that I was indeed dreaming. But it might be possible to come up with different checks that would raise my overall sanity waterline. Any suggestions?
I think whether reality checks make you more rational largely depends on what sorts of checks you are using. There are many checks that exploit “surface-level” features of dreams—most commonly inconsistencies in clock faces and written text upon second looks—in order to determine whether one is dreaming. These checks are useful for determining whether you’re asleep but generally limited otherwise.
However, there is one somewhat deeper feature of dreams that IMO provides a more useful opportunity both for reality checks and for rationality practice. Dreams, by their very nature, lack a logical underpinning for events. We tend to find ourselves in the middle of a series of events without much explanation for how or why we arrived there.
Thus, one reality check that I find useful both in dreams and waking life is the thought “where am I, and how did I get here?” For instance, right now I am at my computer, typing a LessWrong post. I got here from waking up in my room and walking downstairs. I got to my room from driving my car after a party with friends last night.
Obviously, this type of reasoning can go on and on. The interesting part is that dreams lack this.
For instance, I recently dreamed that I was on an airplane. I thought to myself “How did I get on this airplane?” Realizing I had no memory of getting to the airport, I became lucid. You might wonder how this applies to rationality. The answer is that “Where am I and how did I get here” can easily apply not only to physical reality, but also to your mind and thoughts. Indeed, it is very similar to “What do you think you know, and how do you think you know it—” one of the classic questions of human rationality.
In my experience, internalizing the general form of this principle has been very useful both for dream checking and for improving rationality.
I will second value of asking “why am I thinking about this?” in real life. It hasn’t changed my dreaming patterns, but when I was in the active habit of it I learned a lot about how thoughts were connected in my head and how my thinking was affected by the behavior of others and more generally by my environment.
The similar “why am I feeling this?” was also a very useful exercise for flattening out post-traumatic triggers. I find it likely that continuing the exercise past that point would teach me a lot about how my feelings are affected by my environment, but I haven’t done it.
(Why?
Mostly because it frightens me.
Why do I feel fear when I think about it?
Because I believe/alieve/intuit that valuable aspects of my personality will be put at risk if I become too aware of the specifics of how my emotions are connected to the things around me.
Why do I believe/etc. that?
I don’t know; certainly I have no meaningful evidence to that effect, nor any good reason to expect it, beyond the general observation that emotions and affective relations to my environment are pretty fundamental to my personality, and that attending to my emotional responses tends to alter them.
Why do I believe the changes are more likely to be ones I negatively value than positively?
Because these judgments are coming from a part of my psyche that does not seem to have abstracted its value system in any significant way, it values whatever it happens to value and it values valuing whatever it happens to value, la-la-la-la-la-I-can’t hear you.
Do I endorse that?
No, not really.
Then why do I act on the basis of those judgments?
Because the alternative frightens me.
I do recognize this just got circular, right?
I do indeed. Fear is like that sometimes. I also recognize that I’ve just transitioned from asking myself why I feel what I feel to judging myself for feeling that way, even if I word it as a question, which probably isn’t a great thing.)
Great answer, I know this is something I need to do more in life anyway. So I did a little bit of it just now. Sudden increase in levels of curiosity[so virtuous. Wow.]. I’m so curious I even want to know crap like why my housemate sometimes leaves a spoon stuck in the coffee grounds of the compost container. Obviously they used the spoon to move the grounds in there, but why did they leave it stuck there rather than moving it to the cutlery dip in the wash basin? Now that is an extraordinarily minor detail- take that as an indication of just how motivating it is to suspect that you don’t look closely enough at the details of your life to know whether you’re in a shoddy simulation.
A frequently quoted one is to try to read or write text and pay attention to the individual words (rather than just the “general gist”). I don’t lucid dream, but I’ve certainly had the experience of being frustrated during dreams by having text shift around as I try to read or write it. (I have no idea if I would have had this experience before being primed for it by being told to expect it.)
That doesn’t answer the question? I’m pretty sure a honed attentiveness to the consistency of text wouldn’t raise my overall sanity waterline.
That’s an excellent point. I must admit, the whole premise that noticing reality-check-violations in my dream-scenarios has some relation to “my overall sanity waterline” (whatever that is) completely fails to resonate with me, so in retrospect it seems I just collapsed the criterion to noticing reality-check-violations in dream scenarios more generally… thereby, as you observe, failing to answer the question. Oops! Thanks for pointing that out.