My expectation is that you’ve been moving through different cultures at a rate comparable to the one at which you’ve been moving through different biologies.
Since my childhood I have encountered new technologies, most importantly computers and the internet, learned several foreign languages, changed my political opinions, moved to a different country and learned about cognitive biases, which strongly reshaped my thinking. If this doesn’t cause a change in dream colour, why a culture change, of magnitude comparable to changes in the Western culture during the last 80 years, should do? I acknowledge the prominence of black and white movies then, as pointed out by JoshuaZ, but should that effect be so strong? Do you have some other cultural mechanism in mind?
Overall, I probably don’t understand your point. Do you say that I can’t assume with reasonable certainty (95% or so) that the colour of dreams cannot be strongly culturally influenced? If so, I don’t disagree—I am willing to accept a 50% estimate on that, given that the black and white movie bit is a fair point. Or do you say that you are reasonably certain that colour of dreams can be culturally influenced? If so, what evidence supports that?
My point may seem trivial, but this remains a memory error, not an error of subjective experience. … It could even be a language error—dreams do not involve light and, in a sense, can’t be in color.
How does this not entail being mistaken about our experiences? A false belief about colour of one’s dreams doesn’t cease to be false when it is caused by memory failure. If there is actually no sense in speaking about color in dreams, it becomes rather “not even false”, but still remains an error. The original article did claim nothing more than that we can hold false beliefs about our experiences. Whether the mechanism behind those errors is a memory error, language confusion or something else is irrelevant.
How does this not entail being mistaken about our experiences?
Suppose I believe I had chicken for lunch yesterday, when in fact I had pork. That does not mean that, when I had lunch, I actually thought pork tasted like chicken (or, I subjectively experienced the taste of chicken when I actually subjectively experienced the taste of pork—this convolution is my issue with the concept). If the point is, “Sometimes our memory is incorrect,” it seems to be wholly uninteresting and hardly worthy of a top-level post—as it adds little insight to this established fact.
On your earlier point: have your dreams changed, qualitatively, since you were a child? How would you even know? Unless you kept rather detailed diaries, then compared them to a large sample of other people to control for age-related changes, it’d be impossible to tell. Moreover, however complex your cultural upbringing, you had one cultural upbringing (perhaps a multicultural one, but one upbringing). Populations do not experience muti-cultural upbringings, they experience different cultural upbringings.
My point is that attaching percentages to probabilities here is largely an exercise in futility. You are using a piece of evidence to fit into a large claim—we can be mistaken about our subjective experiences. Fact X isn’t either evidence for Y or not-Y; the vast majority of the time Fact X doesn’t really have much bearing one way or another. In short, it’s very weak evidence for a highly specific (and, as I’ve argued, incoherent) proposition. I’ll happily concede that some people may dream in color and not remember this (or vice versa), but
If 80% of people were systematically forgetting overnight what they had for lunch the day before, it would certainly be interesting and worthy of a top-level post.
True. But, if in a 1930 80% of people reported eating chicken at their last meal, and in 1990 80% said they had pork at their last meal, we would not assume that there was an error in their first-person experience without significant additional evidence. That’s precisely what is missing here.
Since my childhood I have encountered new technologies, most importantly computers and the internet, learned several foreign languages, changed my political opinions, moved to a different country and learned about cognitive biases, which strongly reshaped my thinking. If this doesn’t cause a change in dream colour, why a culture change, of magnitude comparable to changes in the Western culture during the last 80 years, should do? I acknowledge the prominence of black and white movies then, as pointed out by JoshuaZ, but should that effect be so strong? Do you have some other cultural mechanism in mind?
Overall, I probably don’t understand your point. Do you say that I can’t assume with reasonable certainty (95% or so) that the colour of dreams cannot be strongly culturally influenced? If so, I don’t disagree—I am willing to accept a 50% estimate on that, given that the black and white movie bit is a fair point. Or do you say that you are reasonably certain that colour of dreams can be culturally influenced? If so, what evidence supports that?
How does this not entail being mistaken about our experiences? A false belief about colour of one’s dreams doesn’t cease to be false when it is caused by memory failure. If there is actually no sense in speaking about color in dreams, it becomes rather “not even false”, but still remains an error. The original article did claim nothing more than that we can hold false beliefs about our experiences. Whether the mechanism behind those errors is a memory error, language confusion or something else is irrelevant.
Suppose I believe I had chicken for lunch yesterday, when in fact I had pork. That does not mean that, when I had lunch, I actually thought pork tasted like chicken (or, I subjectively experienced the taste of chicken when I actually subjectively experienced the taste of pork—this convolution is my issue with the concept). If the point is, “Sometimes our memory is incorrect,” it seems to be wholly uninteresting and hardly worthy of a top-level post—as it adds little insight to this established fact.
On your earlier point: have your dreams changed, qualitatively, since you were a child? How would you even know? Unless you kept rather detailed diaries, then compared them to a large sample of other people to control for age-related changes, it’d be impossible to tell. Moreover, however complex your cultural upbringing, you had one cultural upbringing (perhaps a multicultural one, but one upbringing). Populations do not experience muti-cultural upbringings, they experience different cultural upbringings.
My point is that attaching percentages to probabilities here is largely an exercise in futility. You are using a piece of evidence to fit into a large claim—we can be mistaken about our subjective experiences. Fact X isn’t either evidence for Y or not-Y; the vast majority of the time Fact X doesn’t really have much bearing one way or another. In short, it’s very weak evidence for a highly specific (and, as I’ve argued, incoherent) proposition. I’ll happily concede that some people may dream in color and not remember this (or vice versa), but
If 80% of people were systematically forgetting overnight what they had for lunch the day before, it would certainly be interesting and worthy of a top-level post.
True. But, if in a 1930 80% of people reported eating chicken at their last meal, and in 1990 80% said they had pork at their last meal, we would not assume that there was an error in their first-person experience without significant additional evidence. That’s precisely what is missing here.